💾 Archived View for tranarchy.fish › ~rowan › writing › website.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:01:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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<- Back to writing -- Gender Delenda Est -- Gemini
To begin with the obvious, making a personal website is a funny thing to do in 2022. Web 2.0 has pretty thoroughly dominated our idea of what the internet ecosystem looks like to the point that, for a lot of people my age, the most customisation & specificity we're used to is putting a fancy skin on your Tumblr blog.
I think this has been pretty detrimental for a number of reasons. First--and mainly--Web 2.0 is a entirely corporately-constructed project to enclose the commons of the internet. We can (and should) have serious discussions about the history of the internet within the military industrial complex, but it is undeniably true that the early- and pre-WWW internet was a far easier place in which to maintain an independent and non-hegemonised presence.
While there are larger problems--such as the ownership of DNS--than merely our (and our data's) capture by a handful of megacorp platforms. Nevertheless, I think making more moves towards operating our own portions of cyberspace, whether it's a personal website or a Mastodon server for you and your friends, presents and opportunity for us to develop the tools and capacities necessary to avoid complete capture of cyberspace by capital.
For development purposes I use:
To what will, I'm sure, be the horror of markup fans everywhere I wrote pretty much everything here (barring long-form writing & some academic work) directly in HTML. Atom provides a pretty nice environment for doign this kind of work, and is, at least given the options available, a decent compromise between the invasive, over-featured garbage of most IDEs and the inconvenience of usig a plaintext editor like nano (although I'm moving more and more to working in Micro, especially for Gemtext).
I've made a very deliberate decision to keep the site as much to HTML/CSS and Gemtext as possible, for two main reasons:
By 'modern' web design I mean the kind of slick, JavaScript-heavy, image-laden website that has become ubiquitous in the last decade and a half. I describe this design as 'bad for people' because first because it is prone to failure. If you've ever accessed a website full of floating banners that seem to be in the wrong place or incomprehensible panel animations that lag out your browser, you know what I mean.
This kind of design usually serves only to make it harder to tell what you're actually doing or looking at on a web page, and more difficult to use essential, basic, and powerful web tools like saving images or copying text. While this is not univerally true--JS does have some legitimate purposes--these extra features are normally just flourishes that don't add any actual utility or functionality to the website.
On a more personal level, I also believe the abstraction of the actual function and content of the website is a detriment to the user's experience. It should be reasonably easy to look at a web page, understand how it works, and potentially implment features of it for yourself. Designing for this kind of direct user interaction is also more accessible, as it creates fewer layers of obfuscation to be navigated by screenreaders and other accesibility tools.
Modern 'heavyweight' web design is also bad for the environment. Running more processes & scripts, generating unnecessary HTTP requests for external resources, and transmitting high volumes of video/audio/images consumes far more energy than serving a simple HTML/CSS page that performs the same functions (providing information, links, etc).
I am, again, not against serving audio or video via web per se, but am against the completely unnecessary level of embedded streaming content that many sites now use. Putting a slick little video of your product on the front page of your website rather than a still image is a waste of everyone's time and resources.
As you can see, I've started experimenting with porting sections of the existing site to the Gemini protocol. While I'm still going to maintain a conventional web presence for a more general audience, I'm a big fan of the minimal and human-friendly design of Gemini and Gemtext.
I use Amfora when browsing Gemini, which you can find out about here: