yeah, I know. Again.

October 27, 2024

So, I redesigned the blog. Again. Because the last one was a clogged toilet. I was designing in Wordpress and hosted on Hostinger. Nothing worked—or at least, nothing worked the way it was supposed to. It was a nightmare on the backend. I was stuck with whatever the original developer thought was ‘a good idea,’ or worse, I had to rely on plugins for everything.

Want to pair typefaces for better legibility? Fuck you—plugin. Want to implement a search query? Fuck you—plugin. Need to adjust the margins? Fuck you—plugin. Comment sections crawling with spam bots, having their little orgy with each other? Faaahhhuuuck you—plugin. And then finally, when there’s nothing left, when you can’t use another basic fucking function without a goddamn plugin, you bust the joint out. You light a match and watch it burn into the ether of ones and zeros. ஓரங்கட்டு, ஓரங்கட்டுவோம், ஓல்டை எல்லாம் ஓரங்கட்டுவோம்!

Slapping on more plugins just to make the basics “work”? That’s not a solution—it’s a crutch. That shit wasn’t sustainable. Each plugin, each fix, just creates more complexity and more points of failure. You can’t keep stacking band-aids on a broken framework and expect it to work long-term. The whole structure becomes fragile and the moment you stop paying attention, it implodes, and you’re left with a bloated, unmanageable mess. I had to start fresh, and yes, once again, like a snail, I had to formulate a plot.

In the midst of my plotting, I stumbled upon a talk by Maciej Cegłowski¹ called The Website Obesity Crisis. He drops the million-dollar bomb: 'Why does Crime and Punishment weigh 800 KB, but a 400-word article on Medium weigh 3.4 MB?'

You think Neo was whoaed when Morpheus told him to "free his mind"? You think Hov was whoaed when Escobar torched him on Ether? You think Black Rob’s “Whoa” was whoa? Nah, son! Not even close. I'm sitting there, stunned, thinking, “What just happened?” How the hell did I get here? How the hell did we get here? An intellectually dense, profound novel—a monumental feat of human achievement (which, full disclosure, I haven’t read but have heard a lot about)—compressed into a tiny file. Meanwhile, a rambling blog post about that same novel bloats into an overloaded monstrosity.

The talk, as the kids would say, slapped. It made me realize that my intentions and the tools I was using weren’t aligned. Instead of the tools serving me, I ended up servicing them. I set out to design a system that would help me publish, but instead, I got tangled in the mechanics—losing sight of the enjoyment of publishing itself.

I wanted a system that worked for me. A system that would motivate me to publish. But I’ve realized that the major CMS platforms aren’t built for that. I’m not saying I can’t publish with them; I absolutely can. But they’re cluttered with overwhelming options and extraneous features that, by the time I edit and hit publish, I’ve burned through so many sighs that I’m left exhausted and demotivated to ever open it again.

It’s like driving an unrendered low-poly 3D model of a big shinny truck, crammed with oversized screens and pointless gimmicks and all I want to do is move forward. Can I just drive? Can I just open the door without slicing my finger? Can I live?!”

I’m an old school web guy. I was there when dial-up modems ruled the Earth. I remember lifting AOL discs glued to the back cover of PC Gamer, hunting for the 50 hours of free internet, and building my first website on GeoCities. Geo fucking Cities, baby! If you dig deep enough on the Wayback Machine, you might stumble upon my old site, complete with GIFs of flaming torches, spinning skulls, and the very birth of what we now know as an internet meme—the skeuomorphic dancing baby from Ally McBeal. Great fucking times.

Back then, it felt like the world was becoming the version we all dreamed of. Sure, we’ve come a long way since—but that raw energy, that chaos, that rush of the unknown? As we progress—or shall I say, as I get older—I’m convinced that we’ve lost it.

All these advancements—they’ve snuffed out the fire, the grit, the real excitement. We’ve swapped revolution for convenience, and I’m not sure that’s a fair trade. Or maybe I’m just seeing this from a very selfish perspective.

Call me Granpa Simpson yelling at the clouds with a clenched fist, but I believe things are better when they're designed simply. Simple is efficient. Simple works. Simple is sexy. I’ve always admired things that just work, that don’t require a manual to understand. Simple things are hard to create. They demand thinking. They demand clarity. They demand precision.

I'm aware that progress comes with trade-offs. But I think we've lost some of those core values—not because we're ignorant, but due to nescience, a byproduct of 'progress.' It takes conviction to strip away everything that doesn’t matter and keep what really does. With all the distractions we've stacked up in the name of 'progress,' I can't help but wonder if anyone can still tune into those core values—especially when we've made it so effortless to get lost in the static.

So here I am, once lost in the complexity sauce of WordPress. But now, found—where I belong. Deep in the familiar comfort zone of Markdown and HTML. Just like my portfolio site. This is where I feel most at home, and it’s one of those comfort zones I should never have strayed from in the first place. Just pure publishing without the entire fucking goddamn internet getting in the way.

Thanks for reading,
V.

#personal