Why I Programmed My Own Blog
I’m also getting tired of the modern web.
In thinking about what my daughter needed to know before I felt comfortable letting her do her own research online, I suddenly realized the full magnitude of the mediocrity of today’s internet.
Any trivial search will surface, next to the often salvatory Wikipedia entry, an avalanche of shallow, cheap, SEO-optimized content written solely to sell you something or to show you ads. Clicking one of those links will result in loading, for 10-15 seconds, a little bit of content and a ton of tracking technology, the cornerstone of which will be a cookie consent tool created by the devil’s personal UX designer, asking you not to disagree to disallowing the suppression of necessary legitimate interest cookies. Once you can actually see the content, you will realize that it is, as you suspected, of low quality. Not so fast! Reaching for the tab’s close button will trigger a pop up asking whether you’d like more of this uninteresting, irrelevant, privacy-eroding content delivered straight into your mailbox.
What’s not to like?
When I decided to start this blog, I also made the decision to actually program the thing myself, inspired by a quirky article titled My website is one binary (be warned: nerd content).
At the bottom of the page was a line that resonated with me and even sparked joy:
the web needs more weirdness. and more excitement. and more personality.
Do I agree!
So, this very website has a few purposes:
- To write, obviously, because I rarely write out my thoughts in other ways. I may be an avid notebook user, but I don’t keep a diary. Writing publicly forces me to clarify my thoughts. I blog to think.
- To create a delightful browsing experience. Speed is a feature: I loathe bloated websites. Also, no cookie consent banner to wrestle with, because I’m not setting any cookies. Which leads me to my next point:
- To show that an internet without tracking is useful, even beautiful. I haven’t even added analytics. There could be a million people reading my blog or none at all, I couldn’t really tell the difference. It doesn’t matter, since I write for myself.
- To create something absolutely personal. Building the web server myself ensures that the blog looks and feels unique. There’s even an interactive article.
- To have fun. Despite no longer programming professionally, I still love doing it, and that’s as good a reason as any.
There is nothing special about this website, except that it’s mine, was made by me, and serves original content that isn’t trying to sell you something.
Because that’s the internet I’d like to leave behind for my daughter.