kevq

(writer of the site here) I've never liked Twitter, or any mainstream social media for that matter. The only one that came close for me was Google+, that was brilliant, I thought.

So yeah, nothing to do with the shit show that is Elon Musk, it's just good timing. :-)

I think you misspelled “profit” there. Engagement isn't the driver for the algorithm, profit is. It’s all about showing “fresh” content on every refresh so they have your eyes longer, and therefore more ad revenue.

Masto is chronological, so there’s WAY more chance of natural discovery of content. It’s not buried by the algorithm because it doesn’t align with the hot take of the day, or isn't “trending”.

I’ve personally found Mastodon to be far more engaging than Twitter, but that’s probably not going to be the se for everyone.

Really glad you’re enjoying it! :)

Im a firm believer in links being underlined. I also wanted it to be a little opinionated, as to started life as a personal project, yet easy to customise.

That’s what I see a framework as being - sane defaults. It’s a way to get started quickly without having to write everything from scratch.

I would argue that “frameworks” like Bootstrap, Tailwinds and their ilk are more ecosystems than frameworks, but that’s just me. :)

That’s good to know, thanks. I always (incorrectly it seems) assumed that a citation was valid within a blockquote too.

Hi!

Creator of Simple.css here.

Thanks for all the feedback and comments here, folks. It really is appreciated.

I’m not a professional web designer - this just started off as a personal project that I ended up publishing as people I shared it with seemed to like it.

I’m taking on board the various feedback from people much more knowledgeable than I here, again I really appreciate it.

If you do have feedback/changes I’d urge you to log an Issue or a PR on Github[1].

Also great to see so many other minimal CSS projects that I wasn't aware of. I’ll have to add an alternatives page to the site, I think.

[1] https://github.com/kevquirk/simple.css

Thank you. That’s so kind.

There was SO MUCH more I wanted to mention. Cookie banners being one of them, but I figured it was long enough as it was. I will likely add more to it in the future though.

(author here) I agree - there's definitely a technical ransom to pay for hosting your own site, even with managed solutions, there's still domain names, hosting etc. to work though - it's not for everyone and I'm not claiming it is.

Maybe I wasn't clear on that point, apologies if that's the case. I spoke about POSSE and using more decentralised platforms, like Mastodon.

Again, they're not for everyone either, and I don't expect them to be. It would just be nice if we got a little more of web 1.0 back. :-)

Erm, kinda. The site does talk about POSSE (Post Once to your Site, Syndicate Everywhere), as well as using web 2.0 to your advantage. So I don't think it's hypocritical for the site to be SEO or social optimised.

You're absolutely, 100% right...unfortunately.

Damn. I forgot that's how the Internet worked - if you disagree with something, that means you cannot use it to your advantage ever again.

I disagree with working a 5 day week too...I suppose I'd better call my boss.

Completely agree with this. I have a semi-successful blog and what I would consider to be a successful career. My blog has never helped my career, but I enjoy the process of writing and putting my thoughts/opinions/learnings out there.

Just do it for yourself. If anything else comes of it, that’s a bonus.

You get out what you put in when running a blog. You need to market your site unfortunately. That’s where SEO, social sharing, newsletters and all those other annoying things come in. Even on a platform with an existing audience, like Medium, you will still be drowned out in the noise, unless you’re *very* lucky.

Bonus to hosting your own stuff is that you own it and no one can take that from you.

I’m using (and really enjoying) Bear.

https://bear.app/

I respect the privacy of my readers, so I’d never dream of using Google Analytics - it’s awful.

Both Plausible, Fathom and GoatCounter are privacy respecting alternatives to GA. However, all JavaScript based analytics are blocked by lots of people, so they’re not that accurate. They’re indicative at best.

Then there’s web log parsers, like AWStats. They catch everything, which is where another problem comes in. Crawlers. Many of these tools try to rule out web crawlers, but never catch them all, so these tools tend to over inflate your visitors numbers. Once again, they’re indicative at best.

I’m currently using Netlify Analytics on my site, which uses logs, but I’m thinking about cancelling my subscription and just being blissfully unaware of who’s visiting my site.

OP here. I actually founded the 512kb club.

Thanks for the kind words about the site - there’s still more I want to do to optimise further, like get rid of bloody Jquery for a start!

Having said that, half a MB is a lot of data. You can do a lot with it.

Is it though? Posting the entire thing to a blog, then reposting the entire thing to Twitter over a sprawl of 50 tweets seems even more ridiculous to me.

When a Twitter thread is 50 tweets long, there’s just as much “fluff” as a regular blog post. Plus, the example I use in the post is actually a blog post, so just reposted to a mahoosive Twitter thread.

I think the heyday of personal blogging is mostly over.

Couldn’t agree more, and I also agree that it’s a real shame.

(Writer of the post here)

I really like this analogy as it gives a different perspective. Thanks for that.

In fairness to me though, I never told anyone to change - I simply gave my opinion then questioned why people find it useful and get value from it.

I feel like this page misses the point. While I agree with the sentiment entirely, the author then goes on to recommend a plethora of static site generators.

Fact is, one of the selling points of Medium is it’s simplicity to use. If a Medium user were to read that page, they’d take one look at the many technical hurdles needed to run an SSG and they would dart back to Medium at the speed of a thousand gazelles.

What they should have done, in my opinion, is provide options that have little to no technical barriers to entry. Like managed Wordpress hosting, for example.

For me it boils down to a number of reasons: 1) It’s simple to use and allows me to focus on content. 2) It’s widely supported with a rich community. 3) It just works.

The whole security issues piece is a misnomer IMO. Wordpress has had security vulnerabilities, but the reputation of “Wordpress is easy to hack” is down to poor quality admins, rather than poor quality WP code a lot of the time.

I wrote about this topic a while back - https://kevq.uk/the-case-for-wordpress/

OK. The Guardian's uncompressed homepage with images removed is 3.6 MB. That's still way too big.

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.theguardian.com/xSnIUn3X/

https://kevq.uk

Personal blog that focuses on tech mostly. Also has some fish keeping, motorbikes and recently (since being isolated) digital artwork.

I actually had a Blackberry Priv before the phone I have now. I could never really gel with it - the physical keyboard was awesome though. Still have it in the drawer actually.

Simply install Firefox and your problems are over. That's what I do on my iPad, and what I intend to do on the SE when it arrives.

I don't use any Apple services really, so I won't be sucked in to the walled garden. A lot of things I self-host and I've already checked that equivalent apps are available in iOS.