that's true - i think it ideally should be a tool for that industry, but art is definitely taking the largest beating right now. And I guess the writers' strike means that industry is clearly very threatened too.

it's a shame honestly. you'd hope people would want to pay the money for hand-drawn art, but i think business needs are going to make that a lot less in demand.

Good article, with good advice. I wrote my first blog post partly as a response. (I added backlinks to you and Eden, don't worry)

congrats on starting! i've read so many blogs on https://bearblog.dev when i'm trying to fall asleep at night, and the common advice I see is that you just need to get started and not worry about the actual content you're writing. Glad you came to the same conclusion!

I like all the references too - some of those other blogs were fun to read as well.

i feel the same way about writing too personally. I want to be as anonymous as possible, but sometimes I feel like personal writing is more interesting to read.

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Congrats on the blog / post, yo. I completely understand that uncertainty of whether or not you'll keep at it. Blogging is indeed a hobby, and it will be for some people and not for others. Part of the reason I've been enjoying 'Personal Website'-ing as a hobby is because it's actually turned out to be various hobbies, not just one...

Writing blog posts, reading the blog posts of others, participating in online communities / discussions, learning old / new technologies, implementing old / new technologies, tracking down small / niche / hidden corners of the internet, coming face-to-face with modern culture in an authentic direct way I'd never experienced irl

It's so much more than just "making a site", for me at least. It can certainly become never-ending, overwhelming, and I would totally understand why someone would want to save themselves time by dropping any one of its numerous parts.

I do feel that speaking one's mind is a crucial point of having your own space online, but I'll never judge anyone for how they approach or prioritize their time. Nothing is more valuable.

Specifically in terms of blogging, having been doing it for almost 10 months now, there's a few things I can speak to regarding my own experience:

• I appreciate setting a soft time limit. I've told myself: 2 posts per month. I've also told myself quality > quantity (personal feeling) and that it's OK if I can't meet that quota. But the quota pushes me to try and more importantly...

• THINK. Even if I didn't post something that month, the quota guarantees that I've thought about it. In a similar vein to programming and being stuck on a problem for a while to then finally have that "brain-blast", eureka moment of what to write about / how to write something is pretty awesome.

• I believe reading other blog posts is wonderful "food for thought". Only thing keeping me from calling it "necessary" is that I could appreciate someone trying to keep their writing untainted by others, which could be interesting. But even then, none of us are 100% an island.

• The quota forces me to finish. "Perfection is the enemy of good enough". Finish your posts; not all of them, nor all at once, but what you may find (like I have) is the more time has passed since you wrote them, the more you are happy with them as they are, which is likely closer to how a reader interprets your writing.

• Share your work. Even if it's to the notice of no one. Even if all it ever receives is criticism. Put yourself out there. Meet people "halfway". I don't use any of the big social medias, but I also don't have my site exclusively on Tor (or at all right now, unfortunately). I post to Mastodon, it's ¯\(ツ)/¯ I give others a chance.

• RSS feed is probably the most crucial imo. I browse sites for fun and even I can't keep up with their life-like nature. RSS feed or bust, I think.

• I recently made a small message at the top of my blog with my favorite posts. The more I write the more overwhelming it might be for a visitor so I thought it was a simple, helpful idea.

• Consider putting your email at the bottom of every post. Try to lessen the friction for someone to reach out to you. I also have a comments section and I like it, but email at least, even if it's elsewhere on your site, put it on every post.

• Consider joining a "blog club". I started blogging cause I joined the Lainchan Webring and the lainanons ripped me a new one for having an empty blog page. Then I came across Bring Back Blogging. Later on a forum friend became inspired and started his own: Agora Road Travelogue. And now I've joined IndieWeb Carnival. I also write on my blog because I have a soft goal of getting into ooh.directory and Ye Olde Blogroll. It's like going to the gym, having a buddy to drag you there can be really nice.

Hope any of that helps with how you approach it going forward, stonehead.

Forgot to mention that Starbreaker does something with his RSS Feed that I haven't seen anybody else do. He'll occasionally revive old posts and put them on the feed. Even more interesting he usually adds to them with a small update / comment at the bottom. He's been doing it for a long time so it can be really interesting to read a piece he posted years ago and then see if something's changed or maybe a snarky "told you so". I love it.

Something I'll definitely look into doing once I have a crap ton of posts.

Haven't shared a post here in a while and I worked really hard on this one:

My Lolcow & Me

It's about an old acquaintance of mine, but also a touchy term that, I feel, is growing in popularity recently. It turned out a little longer than I'd prefer, but I hope you enjoy!

i enjoyed reading this! I also had a childhood friend who was inching into this territory but instead we grew apart because of how much I was cringing at him.

i wonder how alonso is doing now

I just bashed out a post about how it sucks that HTML doesn't have an element for loading snippets of HTML containing commonly used shit like nav menus, footers, etc..

Wasn't this going to be a thing at some point? I remember conspiracy theories doing the rounds blaming the JS mafia for getting it depreciated.

You might be thinking of HTML imports, which had only ever been implemented in Chrome and was kinda worthless on its own; you needed to use JS to take full advantage of it. It was removed from Chrome in 2020 because other browsers didn't adopt it and it didn't become part of the standard.

Could be. Possibly also <link rel="import" > ?

Or maybe I'm just muddled.... which happens a lot. As an example, I could have sworn <embed> had been semi depreciated.

That's how HTML imports were implemented, at least according to Google's documentation.

See, muddled. Oh for a steady-state mind.

Though I might still double down on the JS mafia being responsible for there being no native way of doing this in HTML.

I'm OK with blaming the JS Mafia. They're no friends of mine.

php still being the most optimal choice here really is nuts. i feel like if this feature was implemented in HTML, people would reach for JS frameworks a lot less because re-usability of components is still a problem that hasn't really been solved yet, and that's what these frameworks do really well.

not saying react is easier than writing a simple php include for example, but i feel like server-side code scares people, so they'd rather just do it with JS

or even iframes. i see a lot of neocities sites abuse the hell out of iframes

I think so too, but the reason I'm not using PHP myself isn't that I want to do things client-side. It's because I want to do everything before uploading to the server in the first place. Shell scripts and CLI tools like sed, awk, hxincl, and hxtoc make that possible. I have a lot of variables in my pages, and populating them with sed lets me do it once before uploading instead of once every request with PHP.

As elitist as this sounds, a lot of web developers don't know anything but JavaScript. It's their hammer, so everything looks like a nail to them. They might not know how to do anything server-side. Many of them have no clue how much they can do with just HTML and CSS. They still haven't gotten the memo about how HTML5 gives you form validation for free.

And I just got an email from somebody who can't understand why none of my links use JS. Uhm, because that's been basic HTML since 1989? You kinda can't have hypertext without hyperlinks?

I think that's just part of the "party like it's 1999" aesthetic. Frame/iframe abuse was rampant on the original Geocities, too. Not to mention Tripod, Angelfire, and theglobe.com. I was there.

man, i can't believe there's a got dang details element. Every search I did was like you want an accordion? Javascript. can't wait to implement this, thank you!

You're welcome. BTW, I've got a little JS to automatically open details boxes on desktop machines.

window.addEventListener("load", windowLoadEventHandler);

function windowLoadEventHandler() {
  openDetailsOnDesktop();
}

function openDetailsOnDesktop() {
  var isFinePointer = window.matchMedia("(pointer:fine)").matches;

  if (isFinePointer) {
    const details = document.querySelector("details");
    details.setAttribute("open", "");
  }
}

This is progressive enhancement; if JS isn't available on a desktop machine the details boxes use their default behavior.

html has some crazy shit these days. two that I learned about recently are <output /> and <progress />

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/output

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/progress

Speaking of crazy HTML shit, does anyone feel like offering free advice to someone who hasn't done serious web stuff for over 15 years?

If so....

Okay, I'm writing up a little personal site at the moment. At the same time, I've developed a mania about being as backwards compatible as possible. It's become a thing. Which is a bit annoying as I really wanted to do a responsive multi-column layout. Media query, etc. But, y'know, whatever, it's fine.

So I could go div crazy, bash away like it's Y2K and leave it at that.

However! I really don't want to throw modern screen readers under the bus, and they are, to my understanding, quite reliant on contemporary semantic tags.

So the question is, how to cater to both? People have told me that HTML5 degrades well on older browsers, but I have had/seen some issues.

Maybe one solution could be to put classed divs inside the HTML5 tags?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Any direction would be appreciated.

P.S. Man, HTML5 has made stuff so much easier.

This might be of interest to you if you haven't seen it: How Far Back in Time Can I Take My Website's Design + orange site discussion

Imo fren, and it ofc depends on the individual, I, personally, find this web dev shid hard enough without adding additional challenges on top. But I don't do it for a living so YMMV. My most important thoughts for web dev are:

• minimal javascript

• reads / works / looks good on desktop AND mobile *edit

• RSS feed, front and center

And just MAKE CONTENT. The rest is icing. I'm actually not obeying this #1 rule of mine right now, but I'm justifying it as a temporary exception so that in the long-run I can follow that rule. There's other stuff I think highly of but those are the main 3 that I'd tell someone who was looking to start (or restart, in your case).

These are your major semantic tags:

• header

• main

• section

• nav

• aside

• article

• footer

On browsers that don't support HTML5, these tend to be treated as divs, and you can still apply ids and CSS classes to them. There's nothing stopping you from using divs inside them, either.

If you want to do responsive multi-column layouts, you might want to look into using CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid. Or you can party like it's 1999 and use table-based layouts. They still work OK. The cool kids might not like it, but it's your website. Do it your way.

But will it work on a steam-powered programmable calculator from 1968? I'm not so sure....

Joking aside, that's very interesting and useful, seriously, thank you.

Good advice. And since I have a tendency to fall into the over complication trap (and then choke), I shall endeavor to take it on board.

My site is partly intended to function as a place to collect twenty or so years worth of bits and pieces. So, at the moment, deciding how to structure preexisting content is more of an issue. I mean, there are web gardens and then there are web thickets!

Thanks for taking the time to respond. You've helped me a lot. I appreciate it.

Oh, cool, that should sort out any styling issues and I get to keep my divs. Thanks for the clarity.

CSS floats were around in 1999, I think.....

Actually, I'm so tempted to go full Prof. Dr. style.

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

There's something about the simplicity and utilitarianism of it all. A real pleasure. Unfortunately, I worry it would put most people off, or they'd think the CSS file had broke, or something.

That's a great piece. I am so sick of purity spirals and out-grouping. Apart from anything else, do the culprits not know how very, very boring and banal it is.

They want everything and everybody to be as boring and banal as they themselves are. That way they won't have to accept that they're a bunch of fucking losers.