A shift to independent publishing is needed. I used to have sites that died because the upkeep became tiresome, and if - a professional developer with almost 25 years experience of writing web applications - find it tiresome, can we blame people for wanting to use the big platforms?

I think using a static site generator might be OK. Common headers and footers help, and RSS might definitely be a good thing, but that seems to be dying.

One idea from this article I liked was "one page, over many". I don't think he meant have one single page on your website, but rather one per directory, and like he has with this article have one directory for a thought or essay or piece of something you want documenting, and just have an index.html in it.

I like this because I think the one thing that has killed off most personal websites is not the tech tool chain, but that "blogging" created an expectation of everybody becoming a constant content creator. The pressure to create content and for it to potentially "go viral" is one of several reasons I just tore down several sites over the years.

Around this time of year I take a break from work and think about my various side projects, and sometimes think about "starting a blog again". I often spend a few hours fiddling with Jekyll or Hugo, both good tools. Then I sit and think about the relentless pressure to add content to this "thing".

I like this idea instead though. No blogs. No constant "hot takes" or pressure to produce content all the time. Just build a slowly growing, curated, hand-rolled website.

I still think there might be a utility in having a static site build flow with a template function, but a simple enough design could be updated with nothing more than CSS.

Bit to think about, here... interesting.