A few days ago, I was wondering about people writing the software for their personal site – a blog or a wiki or a digital garden or a Zettelkasten – running software the authors wrote themselves or got from a friend. As it turns out, a few people sent me their links and so I've started a collection called The text and the code go hand in hand.
The text and the code go hand in hand
The following is a copy of the intro to the collection.
Sometimes I hear of “opinionated” software. That is, software which has a strong vision of how to do a thing. If you like it, use it. If you don’t, then don’t. But what happens if the software turns out to be something the author of a site wrote for themselves? It’s more than opinionated. It’s personal.
This website presents a number of sites and the tools they use to create and update them.
If you’re wondering why the list is small, the explanation is that personal tools are not tidied up and yet we live in a world of software that is written for being shared. In the corporate context, team members, reviewers and successors need to understand the code. In the private world, public code is polished in order to reflect well on programmers and their abilities.
But *night software* is not like that. It’s not written for the day job. It’s not written to see the light of day at all. It’s not written to be looked at and scrutinized by anybody. It’s intimate and personal, it’s messy and buggy. To take a look is to transgress.
And yet, this software offers the unique chance of being the kernel of convivial software: a tool that we can not only learn how to use but that we can disassemble and reassemble. We can imagine little computer clubs discussing our tools, showing how we added this feature or that feature. It is possible because the tools are small.
So if you’re thinking “that stuff is all a huge tangled mess” and “the code generating my website is not for the public…” – then rest assured. This is exactly what I’m trying to show. I remember my first system being a collection of GNU M4 macros and a Makefile and I’d publish it in a heartbeat, if I still had it. That’s how I wrote my GeoCities pages.
I’d love to show the world the unpolished, “just good enough with a number of bugs I know of” solutions. Let me know if you have one.
#Web #Programming