/blog

Happy "The Web You Want" Day!

It's now five years since Brent Simmon's post 'You Choose', the anniversary of which I have since used as a personal, annual reminder.

Last year, I wrote that 2023 seemed to have seen a seed change. 2024 has built on that, and then some. There are more smaller, independent blogging platforms popping up and more people seem to care about getting away from the big players.

A couple of posts have really resonated recently. Firstly, Mandy Brown's Coming Home over at her site A Working Library. The second is Jay Springett's Bringing it home over on his blog. ¹

I've lost count of the times I've written about ownership and control over the years but tempered by the realisation that we don't need to control everything. Some things benefit more from context. To echo this, Mandy writes:

I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context

To extend on this, Jay has not so much taken ownership of things like his Tumblr but revised the context in which it is accessed — as a subdomain of his site. Context not control.

Although I had never intended to build my own CMS (it started as an experiment to create a lightweight front-end for the old WordPress blog) once it was working it was definitely my intention to bring as much of my online life to the site as possible.

/journal, /notes, /reader — even /start and /garden for their short-lived existences — were all focused on bringing things to the site and controlling how they looked and worked. Features come and go but this is my home on the web and I want as much as possible to be here, the way I want.