Building a Static Site via Pages

There are still things that are not right. I supposed that’s true of life, but I’m speaking specifically about this site. I’ve been gradually setting everything up to run a lean, static, document-first website that can be a central hub for my work in general. When I make errors, and here I mean just in life in general although it’s also true of this specific project, I like to think of them as opportunities to learn. I tend to find many learning opportunities, sometimes far more than I want. I will likely continue learning. As of now though, the site is okay, it’s in a place where I like it enough to share my work here.

Before I go any further, I need to acknowledge, I suppose to you but now I’m getting self-indulgent to be honest and speaking for my own benefit, that this is a pretty odd post. There is writing and software on here that I have shared. I will share more. This post though, I don’t know if I intend to share it. Perhaps I am writing for other people in my own situation. Perhaps I am writing for myself when I look back in a decade and try to understand why I did all the stuff I did and hopefully learn.

What’s Old is New

This site is hosted via GitHub’s Pages system. I read a lot of people who came down hard on Pages for only allowing static content. I have to say after doing some work to set things up here, I’m really enjoying having a purely static site. There is no server interaction, so there is no security labyrinth to navigate. There’s simply nothing to hack on a static page. It’s just a document.

I cut my internet teeth on Geocities, on Angelfire, Lycos, Tripod, and more. In the pre-social-media era there were a plethora of sites offering simple web hosting. Personal web pages made up a massive chunk of the web. Without modern search engines they were linked together by web rings, by simple lists of links that every personal web page offered, by 88x31 pixel buttons, by inline-linking, and by, okay so look I don’t know if there is a name for this last thing but there used to be a norm where people would code little gadgets to embed on a web page and some maybe something halfway reasonable like counting hits or offering users a poll but the gadgets did lots of downright random things like letting your guests feed Tamagotchi-style virtual pet that lived on your page or there was one site that had I guess you’d call it a calendar that I vaguely remember would tell you the name of one random person that died exactly 100 years ago.

Myspace, the first popular social media platform, adopted many of the personal home page tropes. It used a content management system (CSM) for posts, photos, and music. But it also allowed a vast range of customization. It was, at the name implied, your space to customize. With Facebook and later Instagram, Twitter, and more, that customization largely whittled down to checkboxes and a handful of options. The names of these platforms give a kind of honest look at the progression from Geocities where your really build something, to Myspace where you could decorate your space, to Facebook where you were relegated to one of many entries in a massive book that required consistency.

New web creators will get an unintentional benefit from creating a static site like Geocites and others used to offer. A person cannot step into creating a Facebook. GitHub may have limited Pages to static sites for a practical concern, but it offers a huge bonus to anyone new to web creativity. There is no CSM to deal with, far less security concerns.

Static pages offer the same invitation that adventure playgrounds or “junk playgrounds” once offered to kids. A clean, modern playground is a collection of structures that trained and experienced adults constructed for kids, from a position of learned authority. Adventure playgrounds were little more than vacant lots equipped with tires, shovels, lumber, and sometimes an adult to supply nails. They was undeniable level of grit and grime to these scrap yards for children, but they also presented an entirely different social dynamic. A kid has near no capacity to build or modify a jungle gym. A tire mountain, however, built by preceding children offers an invitation to add another a tire. Static pages are closer to the adventure playground, because of the increasing security expertise required to manage a server connected to the internet.

Wild West Mentality

Online, we have come view creativity itself as dangerous. The internet has become the utmost frontier of our civilization and we’ve accepted the utmost frontier attitude where there is no expectation of justice or valid authority. We have in many ways accepted as a normal a situation in which people will assail us and we will neither have any legal recourse nor will we even know who they were. People say, “Someone broke into my car”, but they use the passive voice to say, “I was hacked.” When a car is broken into there is some mental image of an admittedly unknown human breaking into the car, an expectation though the situation could in a best case scenario be understood. I had friend growing up who picked up a cd from a local hardcore band. Rather than print a label for one album they had this dope realization the circular sand paper available at the hardware store, the kind that fastens onto an orbital sander, was just the same size as a compact disc. Being so hardcore, they used these sandpaper circles as label. In high school, it honestly seemed very hardcore but, and stop me if you saw this coming, the sandpaper completely ruined the gears that would suck a disc into the cd player in my friend’s car leaving us with only this one album permanently inside the otherwise very nice aftermarket car stereo. It was so nice in fact that someone broke into his car and jacked it, and afterwards we would occasionally joke about does the car jacker listen to the album and what track might be his favorite. Without ever meeting this person, they were still tangible in our minds, as a topic of anger or laughter. When someone is hacked they do not have a concept of who the hacker might be, where the hacker might be, how many people were involved, how were the people involved, and with the rise of artificial intelligence and botnets we don’t even know for sure that the hacker is human, or was even designed by any living human being.

Static pages offer a playground where the raw materials are tangible, able to be edited, copied, reused in any text editor. They are a space where people are free to tinker because they are free to fail. Failing, not knowing, these are the first steps to learning.

I’m going to stop here before this veers into a manifesto, but I’m stopping in a place of uncertain curiosity. The IndieWeb wiki and documentation is prone to presenting any prospective creator with a massive to-do list. Perhaps we need entry point. A place for new web creators to begin experimenting and exploring.