I redid my website again, to the surprise of no one. It seems that on the small web (as people have taken to calling it recently) that people can't seem to make up their minds about what exactly they want their site to look like. Should I use CSS? A static site generator? Fancy javascript tools? How much is too much? How should the page be laid out? Et cetera...
I've just decided not to think about it too much. I've switched back to the lightweight blog (lb) system that Luke Smith once maintained before he switched to Hugo. Yeah yeah, I know hugo has all those fancy shortcodes and tags but honestly for a real small website like what I want, I just don't care. I'd rather everything be more simplistic and bespoke than what hugo offers, which I'd argue is more for large scale websites, though it works well on a smaller scale as well.
I know in these tech spaces people love to tinker a lot more with things than they care to actually accomplish the goal that a program is normally supposed to assist you with (e.g. "unix porn" is just making what is supposed to be your workspace look more cosmetically pleasing). No shame of course; I am one of the guilty here, but even I have to admit it gets a little old after a while. See, what inspired me to go back to strict minimalism was looking at some old Nintendo sites for games from back in the 90's. Would you believe it? They still render perfectly on a modern browser on a modern display (in under 130 LoC)! Were the webdevs some kind of techno wizards? No, it's just that they used very simple HTML styling in order to get the job done, yet the result still looks very aesthetically pleasing. While looking at that source code, I realized what exactly the internet had lost since then. Everything is so dynamic and automated now, and companies no longer make bespoke websites (namely bespoke graphical assets) like that because all the graphics and images have to look "good" on wildly different display standards between smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops (and even televisions now). Practically nothing is bespoke anymore (a statement that you could apply to society generally speaking), so it's no wonder sites stopped looking good. It was never a resource problem, it was an issue of homogenity and corporate image/posture.
I've been reacquianted with the phrase that "form is function" recently. If that's true, then I'd say that having a site with static generation is worthless to me considering how little I update this page. It's not nearly as simple or intuitive as a bash script, HTML, and RSS feed generation (under 100 LoC!). What do I need this large program written in Go for? Not that Golang is bad or something but I'm not running some substack-esque blog; I'd much rather try to use the internet for it's intended purpose: the information highway.
Recently I was looking at note-taking solutions (a big meme it seems nowadays), and I came across the concept of Zettelkasten, which I had not heard explicitly mentioned before. I was intrigued that such a system hadn't been proposed more often, until I saw on the Wikipedia article (funnily enough) that zettelkastens were considered a sort of analog precursor to wikis.
You can read a book, watch a movie, or even play video games offline, but what the internet has that those don't is the ability to reference information in an incredibly quick (or in Hawaiian, "wiki") manner, which is based primarily off of hypertext. Right now, the language am I using to type this artcile is the Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML for short. The protocol your browser is using to view this hypertext is called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or more likely now, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol over SSL/TLS. Hypertext is primarily composed of hyperlinks, which are key words, terms, or phrases that link to a related topic mentioned in a hypertext document. This system works best in a place where knowledge can be linked to freely and openly, thus creating a decentralized network of knowledge.
Personal wikis still exist of course, so zettelkasten-type systems aren't completely obsolete. I'm not suggesting that I'll make a public wiki either, merely that this decentralization of knowledge, I feel, is the single most thing that made the internet unique and worth creating. As the internet has become increasingly more centralized and search engines have reached all-time lows and centralized LLMs have started to take their place, the decentralized hyperlink network feels even more long gone than before. Webrings, smaller sites, and different personal wikis and forums are still around, keeping the coals burning. Oftentimes these places link to genuinely useful knowledge or things that you simply cannot find in a search engine. It really does feel like the old web is still around in that way. Despite aesthetic differences, there are still decentralized networks of people hyperlinking information to one another. Hopefully I can be a small part of that. The best part is, you don't even need a CSS to do it ;)