In front of you are two personal websites, each used as a blog and to display basic contact info of the owner:
- One is a complex CMS written in PHP that requires a web server, multiple workers, a Redis cache, and a SQL database. The site also has a big frontend component that loads as a Single Page Application and then performs navigation by requesting the content in JSON form, which then gets “rehydrated” client-side.
- The other is a collection of static HTML files and one or two CSS files. No JavaScript anywhere.
If you didn’t know any better, you would expect almost all normal users to have [2] and professional engineers to have something like [1], but it’s actually the inverse: only few professional software engineers can “afford” to have the second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck with overcomplicated solutions.
I’m not convinced by the author’s premises or reasoning for the following reasons:
- If you have a personal website in 2024, you’re not “normal”. The “normal” people are all on social media.
- This guy might not have heard of or been to Neocities or Nekoweb.
- One need not be a professional developer to bash out some HTML or CSS; people on MySpace were doing just that to customize their profiles for years; and the same happens on SpaceHey.
(I might write more about this on my own site, but this is my initial impression.)
only few professional software engineers can “afford” to have the second option as their personal website
EDIT:
I think I still don’t really understand this part, but I also misunderstood the point of the article. I get it, the big ball of PHP is complex and the small pile of HTML is simple. But this says nothing of how you actually get there. Of all the ways we can waste computational power, I think running a WordPress website is a pretty minor concern.
i read this earlier and considered posting it here; i’m glad you did. i enjoy this thesis statement and agree with this excerpt:
And that’s bad in my opinion. Not because of an abstract appreciation for simplicity, but because the web doesn’t belong just to software engineers. The more we make the web complex, the more we push normal users into the enclosures that we like to call social networks.
though it feels a little do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do. it seems there’s high importance placed on the abstract appreciation for simplicity. i feel its important not to demonize or make taboo those personal websites that are less than the purist’s ideal of purely static, command line built with perfect CI/CD with hooks from the git hosting provider of choice. a personal website is still a website. and this is why i’m pro-wordpress (though i have other reservations on its ubiquity as a single point of failure for some large percent of websites. maybe don’t use it for critical infrastructure but for personal websites it’s fine so long as there are backups, staying on top of security updates, etc etc. which IME most managed hosting providers make this easy enough.)
i think the biggest precept that should be emphasized w/ web ownership is portability. i think this is better than owning (or even controlling) your infrastructure. maybe the most important things are controlling URLs to prevent linkrot and being able to migrate published pages/data (Content, for lack of a less-loaded term) from a previous platform, even if tedious.
tangentially, i don’t know what tooling the author would be referring to with this:
One is a complex CMS written in PHP that requires a web server, multiple workers, a Redis cache, and a SQL database. The site also has a big frontend component that loads as a Single Page Application and then performs navigation by requesting the content in JSON form, which then gets “rehydrated” client-side.
generally i feel pretty plugged in to the state of the industry. the author alludes that this is WP (or wp engine? admittedly i didn’t read the techcrunch link). i didn’t think average wordpress site requires redis or is served as an SPA with MBs of js. is this some composite boogeyman of other offerings? squarespace?
I feel like I’m in this strange No man’s land
I use homespun PHP that connects to a MariaDB database to render pages based on URL. No massive framework. No pre-generated SSG. I don’t have a “proper” CMS, just phpMyAdmin (which I’m sure could be argued is effectively a bad CMS). Very basic stuff to me, but perhaps out of reach for someone less technical.
My opinion is pretty simple: use what works for you. If there’s a path to not getting trapped on Big Box Megabop, then great, but we shouldn’t discourage anyone from interacting with the world simply because they feel most comfortable doing so on a turn-key service, platform, or technology. We can certainly, politely, offer suggestions if they’re amenable to getting recommendations around alternative approaches, but the last thing anyone needs is an over-zealous tech bro scaring someone off because “you’re doing it wrong.” And that applies equally to anyone advocating for a tech stack IMHO.
Ideally everyone maintains ownership of their data, and that’s certainly something to be considered. But that’s my perspective and it may not be as salient to every person looking to pursue a creative outlet on the internet.
More exploring, more breaking things. Sometimes that’ll mean finding comfort in something like WordPress. Other times it’ll mean someone mashing together some CSS and HTML they picked up along the way. I feel like the author of this is adding contrived complexity where there needn’t be any.
Edit: Thinking through this a bit further, I imagine the author may be suggesting that we just need simpler, lighter weight services. I probably overreacted 
Even to that end, services like that already exist (as mentioned above)! Neocities, Bear, Pika, etc.
While my inexperience makes my opinion less informed than many here, I find myself agreeing with the general concept of the premise of the initial blog post and I have some rebuttals to some of the points made in this thread, and perhaps my inexperience lends my opinion some credit, as I am the exact person Loris is talking about.
A) Social media can be argued to be another extension of the thesis, making the complex website referred to the middle ground and social media the even more complex even less independent product than those sites with the CMS, PHP, and all the acronyms. It’s an even more apparent consequence of the technical complexity of technology. If the argument is that simpler sites with more independence have a greater barrier of entry to set up, meaning that less people enter the space and more people are exploited, social media is even more evidence of that happening on an extreme scale.
B) I’m incredibly happy resources like 32 bit cafe, melonland, neocities and nekoweb exist. However, they are products of a very specific niche of the internet with it’s own culture that many people who may otherwise find use/joy in web development may not find or particularly like as a path to web development.
I think we can all agree that a more diverse ecosystem and more paths for people to create things and share ideas is aspirational. We should be cautious disparaging someone for not knowing about or perhaps simply not mentioning an accessibility path that works for us but is clearly not widespread or diverse enough to work for everyone.
To me, these two points seem to contradict each other to a certain extent. Yes, we should not demonize a way of doing things we deem less “pure”, but if we are going to view ownership, control, and independence as good and worth striving for, it’s aspirational to try and make all of those things accessible, so that more people at least have the choice.
I only got into this because I have a decent amount of free time, a bit of disposable income, and neurodivergent fueled tendencies to immerse myself in new hobbies regularly no matter how steep the learning curve. If any one of those things changed, it would not be worth my time. However, in a theoretical better world, you would not need a bounty of time, money, energy, resources, and community to do something as theoretically simple as make a website that you don’t have to depend on anyone else for. I very very much agree with the idea that Loris puts forward that the average person encounters many barriers and increased costs to enter the space, and that things can be done to mitigate that. That list of 5 things in the original post is genuinely shockingly confusing and intimidating for an outsider.
I agree that Loris is vague in the solution to and arguably preachy about this problem, but that doesn’t detract from his point that this is a problem. All of the benefits we gain from our less dependent websites we should wish to be more accessible as at least an option to as many people as possible.
Guys, you reduce everything to some developer things, but in fact everything is simple. The thing is that those who use social networks think that Instagram and Facebook are the Internet. But they do not understand that if they google something, then this information is searched for on websites. Now imagine that such people simply do not have enough intelligence to understand how everything works. Naturally, if a person posts something in the style of “autumn has come (and a photo with leaves underfoot, and feet in sneakers)”, then he has no place not only on a website, but also on social networks. But again, I’m not talking about that)) I’m talking about the fact that those who create “sites” on WordPress are usually people who take the path of least resistance, in other words, they are not our people, not a designer, not an engineer, not a designer, not a layout designer, and almost always - not a blogger. Well, I can’t call a girl a blogger if her entire feed is dedicated to her boobs from different angles. I have former classmates in my Facebook feed who only congratulate relatives or someone else on their birthday, anniversary, or wedding anniversary, they simply have nothing else in their feed. What do you think - will this type of content be popular if you create a blog? A blog is not a CMS at all (like a website), a CMS is a tool, and a website is a person’s identification on the network as an individual, that is why you and I are called a society. I can even welcome an author who will create a website on WordPress, on one of the standard templates, but will write the most interesting thoughts that will be cool to read, because the content of the site is part of the design, and the author is the backbone, not a CMS or technology. What difference does it make what you use for an empty site?
Somewhat off-topic, but I am so confused as to why WordPress is seen only as a service that you have to pay (extra) for rather than a tool. This line of thought has somehow convinced so many people that it’s not a viable option for personal/hobbyist websites.
Back in my favourite era of the web (early 2.0), WordPress was IT for personal websites. I actually remember being bullied for hanging on to Greymatter/static sites for so long, and I kind of feel a similar vibe now because I still use WordPress while everyone else has gone back to static.
I feel like we should just let people make websites how they want to make websites. 
I linked to this on my blog yesterday, but realized today I had more to say. So fresh post about it.
I think it’s because the easiest way to use WordPress is to fire up an account on wordpress.com, and they’ve become more aggressive about upselling over the years.
If you’re using WordPress as a tool instead of a service, you’ve got to do all the sysadmin stuff yourself unless you know somebody reliable, able, and willing.
I just want to make a couple of things clear:
- I didn’t post this article because I agreed with it.
- My preferences aren’t prescriptions. I’m not into WordPress, but if it works for you, then stick with it. Your site, your choice.
a site is what is written on it, not what the site is written on
I’d like to repurpose a quote that is often used to talk about genius or capitalism or insert x societal thing the person quoting has a problem with.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops
I am less interested in the weight and convulsions of whoever we deem to be “our people” than the near certainty that people who are designers, are engineers, are bloggers, or who otherwise have something interesting to say or contribute, that live oblivious to(or perhaps aware of and just without the resources to participate in) the personal web and similar spheres.
We cannot look at an entire group of people, especially one as huge as the social media userbase, assume they are irrelevant to this conversation. Social media and other groups that seek to profit off of people creating on the internet are all cleverly designed to hook people and keep them around, regardless of their intelligence or talent. It’s not the other way around where people are dumb and untalented, and therefore choose social media, in my humble opinion anyway.
post removed by moderators for being off-topic and inflammatory
Oops. Sorry! My rant wasn’t directed towards you. It was directed towards the article.
I really don’t like this sort of thinking. Even if it’s true – which I doubt – thinking this way seems to lead people who think they’re in the 10% to think that people in the 90% are “less than” and ought to be treated differently.
I see it in Linux forums, where people who have figured out how to install Arch Linux seem to think that Windows and macOS users are almost subhuman while they are some kind of elite.
No worries. I had suspected as much but wanted to make my position clear.
my opinion - it doesn’t matter what os is under it, essentially android is the same linux, you know what I mean? and most “linuxoids” just click on browser icons on the desktop, this doesn’t make them superhuman
Your use of “linuxoids” is an example of the sort of thinking that bugs me. The fact that I can use a shell prompt as a file manager doesn’t make me better than somebody who’s content to use a GUI as long as it works.
Nobody is superhuman IRL. Not even the billionaires who expect us to mistake them for geniuses.
you twisted my words inside out, that’s not what I meant. I meant that absolutely any user of any Linux is a Linuxoid
but let’s get back to the topic, we’ve strayed far from the point