Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Websites”

And up in the hills, I rediscovered blogs, because those are totally still a thing, and they’re great! There are mountains of awesome blogs out there these days. The list of subscriptions in my RSS reader is getting longer all the time, and I love reading all of them.

James, one option is a Tag Cloud (as popular in the early-2000s) - for example, mine: The Artist’s Notebook: Blogposts by Tag

This got me thinking that I should document some of the design patterns on my blog, noting how they work and why I have designed things in the way that they are. Herein begins a new series on that topic, starting with blockquotes.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

*Waves from another site that uses Webmentions*

A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming:

https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/a-final-word-on-blogs

New blog post by me: Think global, act localhost

I’ve just implemented a Dark Mode colour scheme that will automatically be used on this site if you have set “dark mode” as your colour scheme preference in your browser or OS.

I use Inoreader, and sometimes I do click through to view the post on the author's site (Inoreader has a similar feature to the Reeder feature that Habib mentioned).

Sometimes I click through because I know the author's site is very pleasant to read on, sometimes because I can tell that the post needs some specific CSS to view a part properly, and sometimes (annoyingly) because the site owner has truncated the content of the post in the RSS feed and I need to click through to their site to read the whole post.

Conversely there are a few sites where it's much more pleasant to read them in Inoreader (not all of the sites I follow via RSS are built by good designers!)

It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can’t return to that level of simplicity, we’re seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas.

For some time now I’ve been trying to put together the reasons why I don’t want to go back to “how the web used to be”. It’s because I want to go forward to how (I think) it should be. And we can’t go back to how the web used to be because we live in a very different world now.
About the web in 2024