= 2024-02-18 WordPress is a Beast
A Step Back in Time
It must have been 2004 or so, I was looking for a blogging platform. Up to that point, I had been doing a bit of hand coding to create a small personal website and every time I wanted to update a new news item, it seemed like a lot of work. I 'think' I experimented with Typeface or something similarly named, but I stumbled across WordPress. It was a bit geeky to get it going, but it was relatively simple enough that I could play with the PHP, creating the blog that I wanted for my work, family and hobbies.
Fast Forward
During the last seven or so years, I kind of went off of blogging. I maintained a site for my amateur radio stuff but did not do much beyond that. During Covid, because well, during Covid we all did a lot of stuff like this, I decided to try my hand at WordPress again. What I found was not just adjustments in technology, but a lot of junk that the regular hobbyist blogger does not need. Tweaking a site to your preferences seems so much more complicated now. It seems everywhere you turn now someone is trying to charge you for a platform, a theme or have you install advertising hooks. The simple and exciting concept that you can start a website and publish to the world does not seem so simple and authentic as it did years ago.
Introducing Small Web
Whilst some would include WordPress in what is being coined as 'small web', there are several sites that are being launched to reclaim this space. Services like Bear, Micro Blog and Write.as. Some are more configurable than others, but generally, they are much simpler formats that harken to the earlier days of someone who just wants to focus on writing, rather than working on the platform. I have a project page going ~ 00 Set up an Obsidian Digital Garden and Explore the Small Web where I am experimenting with this. In fact, this site is part of that experiment. It has cost me nothing to set this up and it only took me a bit of tweaking to get it going.
So... let the adventures continue. Interested in small web examples and services, check out my page: ~ Small Web Examples