August 5, 2018

2018.08.05
Don't wait. The time will never be just right. Start where you are, and work with the tools you have and better tools will be found as you go along.
Napoleon Hill
It might be good advice but man, that guy's history as a classic American huckster is amazing
Two related pieces: one is Alex Singh's tweethread on the transition of the web from independent hangouts to the walled-gardens most of us hang out in today:
Over the past 25 years, the web appears to have transitioned from a primarily nomadic culture to a mostly agrarian one, mirroring the Neolithic Revolution 10,000 years ago.
(The whole thing is just like five tweets)

The second is Nick Heer on The Bullshit Web, where a 1998 modem-based system might download a basic news article in ten to twenty seconds, and a 2018 article over a blazing fast connection might take about the same amount of time - and how Google is offering AMP as a system, but it's getting a huge benefit of keeping eyeballs in Googlespace merely by offering a forced respite form the extraneous file crap.

I take pride in keeping up my idiosyncratic blog over almost two decades, and how the side projects I'm on are largely clear of the BS. I know I tend to build too much from scratch, and other developers get some amazing results using Ruby-on-Rails-style packages, but that is kind of the path to the BS Web as well... the people who are on the "Buy, Always" side of "Make vs Buy" may or may not have good understanding of the tech they employ... I'm too uptight about being left stranded if I make a bug in the infrastructure and don't really get how the magic is working to diagnose it well.
On my devblog I wrote up an improvement to my photo gallery initial displays, most steadily applied against those best photos of the year series I did a while back. I really like seeing all those photos together in thumbnail form, not sure I've seen that before.