It was fun to reminisce as I read this article, “How the Blog Broke the Web”, by Amy Hoy. I remember a lot of the Old Web described there, though I was a shade later to the party than she was.
There was a kind of charm the sites enthusiasts put together for themselves and their interests exhibited back then.
When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want.
I don’t see blogs as the original sin of the Web but I do share some of Amy’s displeasure with content management systems. Though the following is specific to Moveable Type when it launched in 2001, the sentiment is still relevant.
Movable Type was designed by bloggers who wrote new diary entries every single day. The form followed that function slavishly. Far from helping to organize or manage free-form content, the format was rigid: title, category, entry. And aside from the single entry itself, you had just four choices for page type: daily (chrono), weekly (chrono), monthly (chrono), and the surprise wildcard, category.
For the writers, that was a revelation. For the folks who were building a digital home, it was a set of pre-fab parts and a dictated floor plan.
The tension between customization and ease of publishing has been the core theme of this site since I realized I wanted a corner of the internet to shout into the void from to publish to. I’ve gone back and forth between both extremes, never able to hit the middle.
The first time I built this site, it was a WordPress blog. I wanted the ability to art direct some posts but WordPress wasn’t designed for the kind of selective high touch I wanted and I wasn’t skilled enough to bend it to my will. It was a disaster.
The lesson I took away from that failure was I needed more control. I ditched the comforts of a CMS and built a custom solution. Twice. You know, like any sane person would. Both allowed for bespoke content—just like the Old Web—and posts that fit into a repeatable template. It was simple but joyous.
That didn’t stop its eventual decline and so my third attempt was an exercise in habit and consistency. I took away all notion of customization which forced me to focus on the words. When you’re not a capital W writer it’s easy to miss that the words you choose and the order you put them in is a fingerprint; your voice is your customization. That approach worked. I updated it on the same night once a week until a life change threw off my equilibrium.
I learned a lot from it. Most important, that the essentials of web publishing lie in an autogenerated post feed and the ability to create and manage posts from anywhere. Yup, exactly what lead to blogs eating the Old Web.
Despite that, I still want to produce custom content when the right combination of topic and presentation inspire. Like Amy, I miss the old, quirky web and want my corner of the current one to be more like it. But most of the time I just want publishing to be easy enough that I can do it from my phone wherever I happen to be. It wasn’t until the last version of this site that I realized how essential that is.
When does written content need to be unique? Why? On the Old Web the answers were “whenever” and “why not?” When content management systems first made websites easier, they became “never” and “it’s unnecessary.” What’s the answer now, when design alone is enough to give a meaningful edge to identical products? I don’t know, but I’m curious. I think I figured out how to make it work for me this time around but, given the journey, it feels like hubris to say it. I’ll see how it goes, though.