The 100-Year Plan on WordPress.com
Some really interesting long-term thinking from Matt—it’ll be interesting to see the terms and conditions.
Some really interesting long-term thinking from Matt—it’ll be interesting to see the terms and conditions.
I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
When I wrote about democratising dev, I made brief mention of the growing “no code” movement:
Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.
But I didn’t describe what no-code is, as I understand it.
I’m taking the term at face value to mean a mechanism for creating a website—preferably on a domain you control—without having to write anything in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any back-end programming language.
By that definition, something like WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress itself) is a no-code tool:
Create any kind of website. No code, no manuals, no limits.
I’d also put Squarespace in the same category:
Start with a flexible template, then customize to fit your style and professional needs with our website builder.
And its competitor, Wix:
Discover the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want.
Webflow provides the same kind of service, but with a heavy emphasis on marketing websites:
Your website should be a marketing asset, not an engineering challenge.
Bubble is trying to cover a broader base:
Bubble lets you create interactive, multi-user apps for desktop and mobile web browsers, including all the features you need to build a site like Facebook or Airbnb.
Wheras Carrd opts for a minimalist one-page approach:
Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.
All of those tools emphasise that don’t need to need to know how to code in order to have a professional-looking website. But there’s a parallel universe of more niche no-code tools where the emphasis is on creativity and self-expression instead of slickness and professionalism.
Create your own free website. Unlimited creativity, zero ads.
Make a website in 5 minutes. Messy encouraged.
unique tool for web publishing & internet samizdat
I’m kind of fascinated by these two different approaches: professional vs. expressionist.
I’ve seen people grapple with this question when they decide to have their own website. Should it be a showcase of your achievements, almost like a portfolio? Or should it be a glorious mess of imagery and poetry to reflect your creativity? Could it be both? (Is that even doable? Or desirable?)
Robin Sloan recently published his ideas—and specs—for a new internet protocol called Spring ’83:
Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.
It’s not a no-code tool (you need to publish in HTML), although someone could easily provide a no-code tool to sit on top of the protocol. Conceptually though, it feels like it’s an a similar space to the chaotic good of neocities.org, mmm.page, and hotglue.me with maybe a bit of tilde.town thrown in.
It feels like something might be in the air. With Spring ’83, the Block protocol, and other experiments, people are creating some interesting small pieces that could potentially be loosely joined. No code required.
The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate.
Um …if I’m reading this right, then my IFTTT recipe will also stop working and my Facebook activity will drop to absolute zero.
Oh, well. No skin off my nose. Facebook is a roach motel in more ways than one.
Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a Wordpress site.
Mike’s blog is back on the Indie Web.
As someone who designs things for a living, there is a certain amount of professional pride in creating one’s own presence on the internet. It’s kind of like if an architect didn’t design their own house.
Two sides of a debate on progressive enhancement…
Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko wrote Progressive enhancement — JS sites that work:
If your content website breaks down from JavaScript issue — it is broken.
Joe Hoyle disagrees:
Unlike Rarst, I don’t value progressive enhancement very highly and don’t agree it’s a fundamental principle of the web that should be universally employed. Quite frankly, I don’t care about not supporting JavaScript, and neither does virtually anyone else. It’s not that it doesn’t have any value, or utility - but in a world where we don’t have unlimited resources and time, one has to prioritise what we’ll support and not support.
Caspar acknowledges this:
I don’t have any problem buying into pragmatism as the main and often pressing reason for not investing into a no-JS fallback. The idealistic nature of a design directive like progressive enhancement is very clear to me, and so are typical restrictions in client projects (budgets, deadlines, processes of decision making).
But concludes that by itself that’s not enough reason to ditch such a fundamental technique for building a universal, accessible web:
Ain’t nobody got time for progressive enhancement always, maybe. But entirely ditching principle as a compass for resilient decision making won’t do.
See also: Mike Little’s thoughts on progressive enhancement and accessibility.
I agree 100% with Mark’s thoughts on what a Content Management System should and shouldn’t attempt to do.
I think that markup is too important to be left in the hands of the people who make content management systems. They all too often don’t care enough about it, and they can never know the context that you will be using it in, and so in my opinion they shouldn’t be trying to guess.
This is good news. You can expect Gravatar service to get faster and better.
Slides based on a usability analysis of Wordpress by some of the Happy Coggers.
Chris J. Davis has turned my life stream thingy into a plug-in for Wordpress. Nice!