Building a better website
Why I nuked my old website and built this one
Date:
[]
Views: [197]
Categories:
[webdev]
Tags:
[grav],
[markdown],
[ai]
I've been thinking a long time about building a better website—for myself and the internet at large.
The first homepage I made was around 1999, and then every couple of years, I'd look to update it to show off the latest stack of technology I'd been playing with. This continued right up until 2019 when I settled on my own CMS that I built using Flask, based on a collection of Markdown files. Updates were pretty simple, and I had a nice landing page for anyone looking for me.
Since then, a lot has happened, both personally and to the state of the internet. Server costs have gone up, so having a tall stack just to serve a homepage no longer seems appealing. I'm no longer building websites for people, so I don't feel like I need a showcase website any longer. Most importantly, though, is the proliferation of AI.
This isn't an attempt to take down what AI has done to the internet; instead, it's a call to action for myself and a certain type of internet user looking at the current state of affairs with a bit of despair. I like using AI tools, with the important part to remember being that they're a tool. These tools make refactoring code and other boring bits of grunt work much simpler, just like search and replace can automate the grunt work of updating a document.
What's difficult now is the snake is eating its own tail. The internet, which these tools were trained on, is now populating the internet with its own product: it's becoming autocannibalistic. It's also becoming full of junk.
Rewinding 20 years, a contrarian friend of mine went on a rant that the internet couldn't be real as it would take a huge number of people to be contributing to it on their own time with no reward. I had to derail his rant by pointing out how much time I spend online building sites and writing content for, god forbid, personal enjoyment.
That's the way I want to go back to using the internet. It's somewhere to show off what you're interested in or creating. The elephant-in-the-room here, though, is social media already provides a route to spread your thoughts. They might travel far, but they don't feel like they travel very deep unless you have influencer ambitions, plus it comes with a side-helping of serious societal issues. The fediverse feels like an honest attempt to create a new avenue for this old problem, but it still doesn't represent the relationship I want with my own content.
So what do I want, and how am I going to get there? Honestly, it's probably a blog that nobody will read. And that's fine. I want to care about what I create and not care about what's done with it, the opposite of how I've been using social media all these years.
I've decided to use Grav as it appeals to my love of writing Markdown, but someone else has done the hard work of wrapping it up in a CMS. I'm slowly moving things off the chunky Linode server I've been hosting everything on and instead moving to their thinnest offering, which should mean I feel a little less resentful about wasting money on a basic blog.
And what will I populate it with? Hopefully, the hundreds of small projects I've never bothered to post anywhere. It always feels like a good way to mark the end of a bit of work is to give it a proper write-up. So, as a challenge to my future self, it's finally time to post about Ikea hacks, LoRa-enabled child safety, my weather station, (more) flight tracking, and backyard astronomy.
I also promise not to post anything AI-generated. No code, no writing, nothing. Let that snake eat naturally.