[HN Gopher] Patterns for personal web sites (2003)
___________________________________________________________________
Patterns for personal web sites (2003)
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-10-30 00:52 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rdrop.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rdrop.com)
| akkartik wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230314004337/http://www.rdrop....
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The consistent header and footer pattern got me thinking about
| why blogs replaced personal web sites. The ability of blog
| software like WordPress to do that automatically was a big part
| of it.
|
| If you design a personal site with HTML and then decide to make a
| change to your site's template, you have to make changes to every
| single page of your site. You could mitigate this with frames (a
| common pattern being to have frames for the header, footer and
| sidebar) but this had usability issues because every page of the
| site would have the same URL in the browser bar and users could
| open the content frame without the navigation. That's why frames
| went out of style by the early 00s.
|
| Blog software solved the problem but at the cost of the new
| problem of content being hard to discover because new content
| shows up first and older content eventually gets buried. Then
| social media made it worse as it evolved from chronological like
| a blog to an algorithm designed to maximize engagement or push
| the platform's agenda. For most content, a personal web site is
| optimal but there isn't really any popular software to facilitate
| this, as far as I'm aware, especially not software that makes it
| as easy to publish new content as it would be if you just used
| WordPress. This means the modern non-corporate internet is full
| of WordPress blogs not personal web sites.
| rchaud wrote:
| Blog software solved the problem of inconsistent navigational
| UX, but created another, bigger one by making everything
| database-powered, server-side and theme-specfic.
|
| The old way of HTML was 100% portable. Copy your folders, drop
| em into a new host and voila, your site is up and running. WP
| is far too heavy for most personal websites. Plus, the second
| you want to tweak something as simple as a background, the
| simplicity of HTML and inline styles is gone and you now have
| to deal directly with the theme template pages, script enqueing
| and what not.
| Tomte wrote:
| You could also just use search-and-replace in your text editor.
| I've realized a while ago that my footer and header are highly
| "searchable", they look totally different from any other part
| of the web site, and many editors can do operations on multiple
| files, even inside a folder hierarchy.
|
| I haven't acted on that, am still using a website generator.
| But in principle? Totally doable.
| Lammy wrote:
| > You could mitigate this with frames
|
| This was also a feature common to software like Dreamweaver,
| Frontpage, GoLive, et al. Server-side includes were another
| popular way to achieve it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
| gwern wrote:
| SSI is still useful today in Apache/Nginx when you're
| developing very large complex static sites: you can factor
| out the parts of your HTML template which change often, like
| anything to do with CSS/JS, and upload them separately. (The
| SSI can be seen as a very simple static site generator which
| happens to run in the web server.)
|
| SSI worked well enough that I doubt that header/footers were
| blog's killer app. As I recall, what really made blog
| software compelling was the commenting system for regular
| discussion of chronological posts. The 'flat' homepage didn't
| work too well with lots of small chronological squibs, and
| the 'guestbook' functionality didn't work well at all.
|
| When you reorganized a homepage to sort pages chronologically
| by date and have guestbooks on each one... you have a blog.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| In addition to comments, I would also add trackbacks [1],
| and RSS feeds.
|
| Trackbacks are mostly dead now, even more than RSS feeds.
| But back when it was a thing, I found it quite awesome and
| it's a feature that I always implemented in my homemade
| blog engines. This was the only time we had an actually
| decentralized social network, even if it wasn't called that
| at the time.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There were static site generators and server-side includes and
| even "bad old" FRAMEs (which were _fine_ at the time; the
| browser chrome for frames being ugly was a browser issue that
| eventually shifted) before blogs if you wanted to keep a
| personal site with a consistent header /footer pattern.
|
| I think blogs took over from personal websites because of the
| "Living Site" patterns this page describes. The easiest way to
| keep a website appearing living was to pay for a "Guestbook" or
| "Forum" script or service. The cheapest way to keep a website
| appearing living was to have a "History Page" that documented
| the changes to a website in reverse chronological order. Blogs
| were sort of the inevitable living merger of the
| Guestbook/Forum and the History Page: reverse chronological
| order, interactions and comments, feels like a "living page".
|
| I know _my_ blog certainly began as a "History Page" of sorts
| well before the word "blog" existed or dedicated blog software.
| (In High School I even wrote my own proto-blog engine that I
| thought was simply a Forum engine to make keeping my "home
| page" easily up to date and living.)
| brianpan wrote:
| Not only ease of publishing, but search engines also preferred
| new content over "stale" creating incentives to blog.
| cxr wrote:
| > If you design a personal site with HTML and then decide to
| make a change to your site's template, you have to make changes
| to every single page of your site.
|
| Unpopular opinion: not only do you not have to do that, you
| probably shouldn't do that. It's only an unfortunate
| consequence of _deformation professionnelle_ that people feel
| compelled to. People treat the Web like it 's a sui generis
| medium. It doesn't have to be.
|
| If you wrote a book (or a pamphlet) and decided to go in a
| different direction, stylistically, from the house style that
| was applied in one of your earlier works, would you insist that
| your entire back catalogue be reissued in the new style (not to
| mention insist on denying access to the first edition to
| interested patrons)? If you wouldn't do that, and you wouldn't
| be happy with an author you admire whose productivity were
| hampered similarly by an unfortunate decision to focus their
| attention and efforts on one of the most irrational yak-shaving
| exercises for a writer to undertake, then you should really
| reconsider whether you really do need to reissue all your old
| blog posts in a style that conforms to the fashion of the era
| in which the newer ones are being published.
|
| PS:
|
| > chronological like a blog to an algorithm designed to
| maximize engagement or push the platform's agenda
|
| No such algorithm exists. The problem is fundamentally
| heuristic and not guaranteed to deliver the desired results.
| It's _more_ appropriate to refer to a (reverse) chronological
| sorting procedure as an algorithm (because it is one) than it
| is to use that word when talking about fuzzy recommender
| systems.
|
| In technical forums, let's not adopt regressive language
| changes that leak in from popular culture following trends of
| journalists latching on to words (like "algorithm") just
| because they sound cool.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > would you insist that your entire back catalogue be
| reissued in the new style
|
| That's an interesting point! But I think that many publishers
| might do that IF it were feasible, which it isn't in print.
| But it is feasible on the web--feasible, if annoying in those
| days--and that's why they did it. It's not that the web is
| sui generis (although...) but rather that it is distinct from
| print in a few ways, and editability is one of them.
| laxdg wrote:
| In my experience, https://getpelican.com does a good job of
| allowing you to edit themes on all pages at once with its
| static page generator.
|
| There are a lot of built in features designed more for blog-
| like websites, but I've found it pretty easy to make my
| personal website with it.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| Distilling common (or if you will "tribal") design knowledge into
| pattern languages has fallen a bit out of fashion in the 20 years
| since this article has been published. I've searched for similar
| resources a while ago, and I found only a few other attempts at
| this subject at all.
|
| The earliest was published 1996 in the second volume of "Pattern
| Languages of Program Design": A Pattern Language for an Essay-
| Based Website by Robert Orenstein. An early draft of it is only
| reachable via archive.org:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19961227102428/http://www.anamor...
|
| Then there was "A First Approach To Design Web Sites By Using
| Patterns" published 2002:
| https://hillside.net/vikingplop/vikingplop2002/VikingPLoP200...
|
| Also in 2002 there was a book "The design of sites", which even
| saw an updated second edition in 2007, but had a clear focus on
| e-commerce and corporate websites.
|
| The submitted resource, Mark Irons' pattern language, was
| published in 2003.
|
| And then, 17 years after that, an unfinished (maybe still in
| progress?) attempt in 2020: A Web Pattern Language:
| https://kmcgillivray.github.io/a-web-pattern-language/
|
| I think one problem is that personal websites are to some extent
| the training ground of the web. The stakes and incentives are
| different than for your run-of-the-mill boring corporate website.
| There are more design outliers and more experimentation, which
| probably makes it harder to distill patterns out of it. Although
| I would love to read through a comprehensive pattern language
| that reflects the more personal and non-commercial corners of the
| web of today.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-30 23:01 UTC)