Web Appreciation 3

🌍 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 set fire to your server - literally start overheating the damn machine so much that you half expected smoke to come out any minute - until you got a notice from the owners of the hosting service that you’d exceeded your allotment.

That’s when you found out the true colors of your hosting situation - how much traffic they could actually handle and also how they reacted to overages.

If you were lucky, you had the kind of hosting that would shut it down proactively. That was a good scenario.

Think about it: getting too popular and having your site go down was a shitty yet good scenario, because it’s the lesser of two evils compared to getting stuck with some crazy bill.

That’s what putting up a site felt like in the good old days that we tend to romanticize in hindsight. In reality, you can do so much more now with a fraction of the effort and if you’re smart about it, entirely for free.

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⚙️ The New Tools

I’m sure there’s a million other things I can’t remember but good God, it’s just so damn easy now. And it has been for so long that I usually take it for granted.

👉 *I keep switching from I to you, first person to second. Pick one (probably first) and stick to it. *

For well over a decade now, I’ve had the same setup: a static site that’s a work portfolio and a writing outlet, all served up by a rock solid and blazing fast CDN. Updates just take a simple git commit.

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.

👉 Trim down the bits about how Netlify works, save that for later about Astro, and 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 anyway with old-school Django and Rails setups. And yet now here it is - for free, well-maintained, performant, and globally available.

It’s absolutely incredible.

🌐 The Magic of Instant Publishing

I really like this magical feeling of a worldwide instant publishing platform. It sort of expands my mind and gives me the kind of perspective reboot that I’d get from teaching html and css to newbies. Seeing the wonder and spark of curiosity in their eyes when you open a developer panel to show them the source behind a website, when they realize that under all the bells and whistles are just words. Words they can learn and change.

👉 Like the scene in the first Matrix about the lady in the red dress.

Seeing this foundational view helps me appreciate what we have - instead of being brought down when I think about how websites these days are inherently niche compared to more image- and video-based and consumption-based social media.

👉 Clumsily worded but the sentiment is worth capturing. It’s easy to get size envy and think of the web as niche compared to other mediums, but add up the long tail and you’ll see why things like vinyl and dedicated cameras are having a mini renaissance. It’s the law of big numbers - a small percentage of a sufficiently large thing can still be a big number in absolute terms. Older things get quietly perfected after their so-called obsolescence. Or: the death of the web has been greatly exaggerated, or whatever that fun quote is. Yes there are challenges to it in terms of discovery and search and a.i. and etc, but it’s never been easier to contribute to it. Two things can be true at once.

But so what? A lot of things are going to look small compared to those machines of infinite jest. Hell, Hollywood is even struggling for eyeballs and attention compared to TikTok. So forget the relative comparison. Look at the absolute side of things.

The web as a primarily text-based publishing platform for independent creators is fucking huge. You take that small, niche audience of people that are craving an alternative to these larger mainstream channels - or just looking for a way to contribute themselves in a way that feels more authentic, rather than the unfortunately performative side of a visual medium - you take that long tail and add that all up, and that is a huge global audience.

And exactly an audience that I loved and fit in with from the very beginning: outcasts, independent thinkers, freaks and geeks, pirates.

👉 This section ramps up pretty quickly to being very grandoise in scale. Actually could make a good wrapup section, so a smaller and much shorter introduction focused on tinkering would be a better way to kick things off. Swap in from the other essay or create something from scratch along those lines.

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🍽️ The Web’s Hidden Superpower: Consistency

But there’s another aspect to the web that actually makes it magical beyond just instant worldwide availability, and that’s consistency.

I’ve been watching a lot of Hell’s Kitchen lately because I’ve been craving some of the energy and chaos of the early episodes of The Bear, and consistency seems to be at the very top pinnacle of their criteria on that show. And you can see why.

Basically they weed out the amateur cooks from the pro-grade chefs in the earlier episodes to see who has the foundational skills like taste and creativity, then focus on who can most consistently deliver.

Alternate take: they focus on this the entire season. First with whether they can consistently serve up dishes from an existing menu from Gordon Ramsey. Then, as they whittle down to the finalists, they look for not just the creativity and originality of their own creations, but who can can consistently deliver their menu’s expectations to a full restaurant.

A lot of other aspects of an incredible fine dining experience are foundational: the quality of the food, how it tastes, the creativity of the individual chef, the presentation of it. Those are the kind of things that come up when they’re first whittling away the initial contestants, until there’s only a few of them left and the differences move up the stack to issues like teamwork and consistency.

The early rounds of Hell’s Kitchen weeds out the cooks from the chefs.

Because in the end, a chef has to labor away not just to come up with a creation but to then organize a brigade of people to create that exact same experience day in, day out, night in, night out - for infinity.

That’s one of the differences between a cook and a chef: scale. A cook knows how to make something themselves on a one off basis for a small group of people, all on their own time and schedule. A chef knows how to get a team of people to make scores of dishes, all with the same level of care and precision, again and again, day after day.

Think about how hard that is and what a difficult business it is. Just one slip-up, and a tiny percentage of your products that you produce could create such an outsized reaction. Whether it’s dissatisfied customers because an entrée was too cold, or all the way to the extreme of someone getting E. coli poisoning and it spoiling the business of the entire restaurant.

Think about how difficult it is to achieve that level of consistency. And when you watch the show, you see how it weeds out the people that don’t have those foundational layers - and how much consistency matters at the end.

When you have a finale, like the season three that I just watched, where both chefs created amazing food, you could tell consistency was the razor-thin fine margin between the two candidates. The experience of one as an executive chef - someone who had gone through culinary school, knew how to give out orders, and marshal the brigade - created that extra edge. Whereas the other one, from a self-taught nanny background, couldn’t organize her troops and had chaos in the kitchen that led to some orders being returned.

Also maybe something about originality and uniqueness being the higher Michelin stars, as opposed to just plain quality for the single star?

What is the difference between 1, 2 and 3 Michelin Stars?

One MICHELIN Star is awarded to restaurants using top quality ingredients, where dishes with distinct flavours are prepared to a consistently high standard. Two MICHELIN Stars are awarded when the personality and talent of the chef are evident in their expertly crafted dishes; their food is refined and inspired. Three MICHELIN Stars is our highest award, given for the superlative cooking of chefs at the peak of their profession; their cooking is elevated to an art form and some of their dishes are destined to become classics.

👉 This section is way too long and feels like I’m milking it a bit. Probably deserves to be it’s own post that you can link back to later on. Instead, just make a quick reference to consistency of cooking. Making it shorter means you can lump it in with the other trends below like theater to tv and movies, old school graphic design to desktop publishing, and give this tipping point a name. There’s maybe even more trends you can pull in from computing? Like the way a CD for software could be scratched or missing one floppy from a series that you needed to install something. There’s some kind of industrial age lesson in here, right? About producing at scale. Andy Warhol on Coke being the same for a king as it is a pauper. But think about the enormous expense of the distribution channels for those other mediums or products compared to the web - we can now put our own voices out there, write words of our own, designed in our own way, collected together in whatever way makes sense in our own brains, then shared as one entire thing. Not diluted by ads or other people’s thoughts, crowded together until they all drown each other out and blur into one scrolling session after another.

A website isn’t just niche or retro, it’s a premium experience. It’s fine dining. Each site is its own magical creation, lovingly served up for us to consume in a leisurely way, not nuggets of fast food meant to be crammed by the fistful during a work break in the rat race.

🏆 Ooo, we found a winner! That’s the angle: how a personal website is like fine dining. Sleep on it and expand on this later…

(what about the idea of magic being a ton of effort into making something special? the simple and effortless thing is to just dump your words into an online service. putting in more elbow grease to give this words their own platform pays off by making something unique. you can tie this into the fine dining part easily, just make it about how you elevate a tasty dish in unexpected ways, especially with the modern trends of reinventing comfort food or fusion cuisine that makes unexpected combinations. That takes work, creativity, experimentation, and all the sweaty fun parts of what innovation is like in the real world. Not a single eureka moment but a slog of moments where you tinker away endlessly until it’s just right. That’s where the magic comes in in anything worth doing - putting in more effort than is actually needed on paper.)

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💾 Replication Without Effort

That’s the kind of consistency you get for free with the web.

You can pour in all the upfront that makes something magic - where you put in way more effort than someone might imagine to create a little piece of magic - and then the work is done. You can dash off a quick rough note or you can make something magical. But either way - whether you’re making a quick hit of a nice little snack or a larger, elaborate dish on a level of fine dining - your work is replicated perfectly for everyone.

It’s kind of similar to the magic of TV, compared to the inherent difficulty of reproducing performances in theater or musicals. Or in graphic design - you can design the perfect poster, but then you still have to find a place that can reproduce them all at a high quality.

This consistency is amazing - and something you get for free with the web.

👉 * if I’m honest with myself, this whole part about consistency has to go away. It was like a gateway drug to bring out the other insights that are more personal and historic. I’m not a chef and milking the technology of cooking as a metaphor for create on the web is maybe something that should stand on its own.*