troydenton.ca

Yep, I'm on the internet

Uglying up my website

Jan 23, 2025

My old blog used wordpress for over 10 years. It was a pretty smooth experience, all things considered. Wordpress is a good choice for simple websites. I opted to go even simpler, as you can see.

The main reason for this change is that I miss the old internet. This aesthetic is my love letter to 1995; sticking to plain HTML is my expression of function over form. You could read this website with curl almost as easily as with a web browser. I am editing this post with vim, over an ssh connection. These are things that computer nerds like.

Thinking about simplicity and why I like it, I'm reminded of a home repair job I did. My lawn mower's handle came off, because a bolt fell out of it and ran away. I walked to the hardware store and bought a new bolt. I put the new bolt in my old lawn mower. This fixed the entire lawn mower. No firmware upgrades, factory resets, technician visits, conference calls, nothin'. It was very refreshing. "Simple fixes" are what working with HTML feels like.

The more I think about it, my old wordpress blog added all kinds of images and javascript just to force your browser to sing and dance about my words. It's like I'm giving your computer a dress code, but I really don't care what your computer is wearing. There's no need to bring cascading style sheets into the situation, those are barely real. Just wear my words against your eyeballs for a while.