🌍 A Shared Sentiment
I’ve been having the same thought as Louie recently, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think there’s something in the air about the IndieWeb or blogging in general that’s making a niche comeback - whether it’s first-time creators looking for an alternative to the giant corporate platforms that dominate attention, or old hands coming back to their roots and seeing how far this mostly plaintext medium has come since our early days.
👉 Don’t build it up, make it less grandoise and focus on your own stuff. The appreciation grew out of tinkering, it’s not some giant trend to analyze.
*Something as simple as I love the feeling of tinkering on my website. I even love it so much that I get a secondhand contact high when other people talk about their websites at our weekly Indieweb meetup. *
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🧱 The Old Way
Just think about all the things that I had to deal with back in the day, things that are now abstracted away at the click of a button.
You used to have to get your own servers, like I did with DreamHost. Or host things off of your own personal computer. And being responsible for this bit of computing hardware wired up to the larger world made you worry about malicious security attacks for different software you wanted to try. It wasn’t simply as easy as signing up for a service like it is at WordPress.com. You had to know a little bit of the LAMP stack - Linux/Apaches, PHP and MySQL - just to try out some new software for forums, blogs, wikis, whatever. You had to worry about setting up, keeping it going and getting hacked, all before you could get a feel for whether you even liked the thing.
(you still can do things this old way, by the way - there’s nothing stopping you)
And then, if you struggled through all that and put something out there, the only way you could get the word out about what you did was completely grassroots. There was no social media that could potentially act as a marketing channel or distribution. Something that could bring eyeballs from other areas.
Even if you didn’t care about building an audience and just wanted to write something interesting for your small circle of friends, there was still the chance that it would get picked up by one of the major blogs. That was so common that we even had a phrase for it that was specific to one single blog - we’d talk about getting “fireballed” by Daring Fireball. There was even a colocated server farm of Mac Minis that constantly archived his work in real time so that you could check out content from links that were down from the traffic.
That simple act of them linking to you would completely and utterly drown your server - melt it to its bones - until you got a notice from the owners of the hosting service that you’d exceeded your allotment. Or if you were lucky, they shut it down proactively. That was a good scenario.
Think about it: getting too popular and having a 404 was a good scenario compared to possibly getting stuck with some crazy bill.
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⚙️ The New Tools
I’m sure there’s a million other things I’m not thinking of, but good God, it’s so easy now. And has been for so long that it’s easy to take it for granted.
For a solid 10 years, from 2013 to 2023, my website was hosted on GitHub. And their built-in invisible CDN still outranks other paid alternatives if you do any kind of performance testing, like the kind I did when I switched over to Netlify in 2024.
👉 Expand just a bit on how cool it is that a CDN could be free. You could even go with Cloudflare. CDN’s were a big business just on their own back in the day. Remember Akamai?
I lump GitHub and Netlify together because they’re functionally identical when it comes to my publishing workflow. When I want to push up local changes to my server, I just save my work in GitHub and hit a single button to upload. Boom, done.
I use a GitHub client - again, no terminal commands. I don’t have to relearn the memorized little spells of command line magic or do any kind of complicated rebase operations. I just use a nice app that is almost exactly like the old-school FTP apps like Transmit, except now the changes have a version history that’s timestamped with helpful commenting along the way. It’s so useful that I primarily use it for my own stuff now. I don’t even have to use it for work as much lately, where my designs get tossed over a wall to a team of developers and then I’ll tinker with live prototypes.
Once I publish those changes and just hit a little push button on my GitHub client, there they are - within seconds to a few minutes - up on my website. Before, hosted on GitHub CDN, and now on Netlify. But again, functionally not that different.
👉 unpack how a CDN works
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🪄 Invisible Magic
My tools do so much interesting heavy lifting behind the scenes without me having to think about it. Not just GitHub and Netlify and a worldwide CDN. But the reason I switched to Netlify is because it will automatically build a website that uses the Astro framework.
So now I get the kind of templating magic that before I used to have to maybe run a Django server and keep it constantly running. Now I get all the power of templating and logic and all the other bells and whistles of a web framework without even having to worry about app uptime or server upkeep.
I haven’t even come close to pushing the edges of what I can do with Astro. I’ve been using it primarily as a glorified portfolio and blog. And that’s fine. That’s often all we used to do with old-school Django and Rails websites. And here it is - for free, well-maintained, performant, and globally available.
It’s absolutely incredible.