20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like.
As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.
Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.
All the simple old stuff still works. I recently set up a blog [1] that is just:
* Each post is a plain HTML file, served as-is.
* I make new posts by copying a template HTML file which has a small amount of basic structure and includes an external CSS file.
* When I write a new post, I run a script that scans the HTML files and makes an index.
If at some point I want something fancier I can extend it, which I've done over the years for my main blog, but for now it does what I need it to do.
I've been blogging for 17 years, and gone through a number of iterations (started with Wordpress, then my own PHP blog, then Posterous, then Jekyll, and now Scroll). The language I use now, Scroll (https://scroll.pub/), is very simple, you might want to check it out. You can start small with something like this:
header.scroll
# My Blog
firstPost.scroll
import header.scroll
Hello *world*
<b>Its fine to use html too</b>
index.scroll
import header.scroll
snippetsIt can be a lot to deal with. I added a comment widget again just recently because I missed some of the feelings of conversation, but I probably picked one that won't likely get as much conversation as some of my past tools did because higher barrier to entry on first comment (but that also makes the spam floor higher and gives me a trade-off in data ownership versus tracking JS). We'll see how long I leave it in place this time.