Making websites is hard

I found this really awesome webpage yesterday that resonated with me. I’ve put in a lot of work over time to make my website cozier and easy to contribute to, but I’m still not happy with it.

HTML/CSS should evoke feelings of sculpting with digital concrete, but it feels more like building bridges with uncooked pasta. The whole digital design landscape is begging for simple markup languages that can participate in honest architecture.

This is exactly what I’ve been craving, which is part of why I integrated my website with my Obsidian notebook. Now I literally write markdown, and then it’s automatically translated into a webpage. It’s not exactly sculpting digital concrete, but it lets me be more focused on writing and creating rather than getting caught up in processes.

Maybe I’m just a simpleton, but I feel like creating your own space shouldn’t be so difficult. Really, I only designed small pieces of my website (like my table of contents formatting, which I am pretty proud of), and it still took quite a few hours.

Reading websites is hard, too

Modern websites are built with more JS (dynamic) than HTML (static), and dynamic content is difficult for computers to read. Imagine ordering The Hobbit and unexpectedly receiving a N64 cartridge with an e-book on it.

I’ve hit upon related issues recently while playing with LLM-assisted website scraping. Turns out, I can’t make heads or tails of the average website’s source. The visual experience is totally mangled by the languages needed to render it. Despite most LLMs being trained primarily on web content, the prospects of asking them to search for signal in the source are pretty grim.

Also nobody reads my stuff

The last thing I have to say about the “cheap web” concept is that running your own web page exposes you to the harsh reality of low visibility on the web.

My first engagement with social media was on Facebook around 2011. I was just starting high school. I got really into posting little jokes that could get as many as 60-80 likes in their lifetime. That shit was like a drug to me, and all I had to do was draft a few sentences and send them off to be marketed to my family and friends by Facebook. I honest to God felt like a rockstar when I met a family friend who told me they loved my Facebook posts.

Now, I probably spend an average of 5 hours writing each high-effort post about my technical projects, and I can count on two fingers the times my work has garnered any attention at all.

Sure, maybe it’s the subject material, but surely the medium has to assume some of the blame. Nobody is doing marketing for my website, and Google isn’t in a rush to prioritize my humble blog in search results. If I want engagement, I have to pound pavement in the digital world, which means I need to either spend money on advertising (yuck) or actively participate in digital communities. If I want engagement, I need to develop and maintain relationships with people who will engage with and distribute my work. Or, maybe, I just need to reshape my work to better connect with others. Who knows?

So what am I bitching about? Is it even a problem that no one reads my stuff? I think social media has made me entitled; putting in a few hours of effort and not receiving 60 likes and 3 comments feels like a total blowout. I take considerable psychological damage every time I publish something and receive radio silence. I can only assume this is conditioning by social media, because the prolific letter writers of the past would receive, at best, a single reply to each of their letters, which I’m sure took considerable time to write, and any feedback probably lagged by days or weeks. Maybe I should think of each article I write as a correspondence with the singular individual to whom the article is tailored, delivered as a message in a bottle cast into the sea.

Conclusion

Anyways, I loved the cheap web article, and I’ll probably be back to explore the links within it further. I’m thankful it inspired me to reflect on my own experience with blogging on the internet.

I think I’ve been taking steps in the right direction by making it easier to write (I wrote this on my phone while riding the bus to work) and developing healthier expectations about user engagement. My writing is firstly about fostering personal growth. Any clout received along the way would just be a happy accident.