Welcome to the old web 🔗

Recently, I came across this beautiful blog post by Robb Knight, the idea of which I immediately subscribed to. I still vividly remember critizising the Web 2.0 movement when it started to emerge in the late 2000s, and every company suddenly advertising under a facebook link instead of a custom built, unique web experience.

I feel like things have started to shift back towards individual web pages again - slowly, gradually - but nonetheless. It’s a movement I embrace, as it requires the publisher to at least undergo a minimum amount of effort to share their thoughts, which in turn should lead to an increase in quality of content.

Just look at some of these:

• https://iotcl.com/uses/
• https://blog.m5e.de/uses/
• https://tiim.ch/pages/uses
• https://silvestrevivo.github.io/uses
• https://www.ballpointcarrot.net/uses/
• https://calebhearth.com/now
• https://joshbeard.me/now/
• https://www.cygnoir.net/now/

And you can find many more here: https://nownownow.com/

Maybe this community of homebrew fanatics was never really gone, and I was just too blind to see or find it. I was never very good at immersing myself in hacker groups, although I always admired the spirit and the dedication of the people involved. And while I did participate in a number of CTFs back in uni, the hobby unfortunately just didn’t stick.

With the rise of the IndieWeb movement, I hope we will continue to see more of what feels like a glimpse into the past again, where it was completely normal to publish your own page, without the use of massive frameworks.

If you’re now feeling like you’d like to travel back in time a bit yourself, I can also recommend the following video of how the famous trumpet skeleton gif was created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYcHOEjGzPA

Until next year or whenever I blog again, lol.