Before social media became what it is today I used to blog a lot. And I wasn't the only one, many people did. There was this idea of a decentralized and open web: everyone had their own little space on the web (with a selfhosted blog, or a platform like wordpress or blogger).

The internet looks very different now. People consume (and produce) more on the internet than ever before, but almost all content lives on these big social media platforms designed to keep everything and everyone inside. It feels like the web is shrinking.

There seems to be some resurgence into the old web now, time will tell if it gains any real ground. It's an uphill battle: Besides most online eyeballs now being glued to social media apps, we're seeing AI take over the way people interact with the internet altogether. Back in the old days if you wanted to know more about something you'd google the term and start going through the websites Google said are most relevant. Now AI is a lot more efficient in getting you the answer to whatever you want to know in front of you in real time. If the answer was on a forum, blog or any other website the AI will fetch it behind the scenes and summarize it for you. From a UX perspective this is the obvious direction things will continue to go.

A second problem is that of quality: people who put a lot of time in their content (and are very good writers) can now more easily get paid for their work, through paid email newsletters and paywalled websites. All of their content doesn't live on the open web anymore (but at least there are no ads here). This is probably a win for writers, as well as the quality of the overall content being produced (and read) globally, but it's a loss for the open web.

So if you have a blog nowadays with all kinds of useful information (ignoring the discoverability as well as whether other people actually find it useful), how many people are really going to read it directly? Should you still put time into designing your blog and writing good articles?

Fighting fire (AI) with fire (AI)

Regardless of all of this, I feel a (nostalgic) desire to blog again. I used to keep two blogs: this techblog you are reading now and a travel/picture blog called mijnrealiteit. Whenever I get this feeling, I start with updating the blog software: Throughout the years both blogs have gone through different iterations: from custom CMS systems, to WordPress instances with custom themes, to ending up with simple statically generated websites. You can find some historical posts here.

So towards an AI coding tool I turn, which have the power to write/change hundreds of lines of code in seconds with a simple one sentence instruction. AI coding tools are a widely debated topic in programming circles. They can clearly write a lot of code very quickly, and in my experience there are definitely cases where the speed/quality outpaces what a human developer can do. But there are also many cases where it writes junk (called slop) and does things that make no sense.

I actually wanted to do the very opposite of what "vibe coders" typically use AI tools for: instead of providing a simple (and vague) instruction to let the AI go crazy and build a new blog from scratch, I used it to strip/simplify my existing blog software towards the open web hygiene I value:

• Remove all external javascript (visitor trackers, etc)
• Remove other third party dependencies as well, like fonts loaded from Google
• Make the HTML/CSS structure "minimal" and dead simple, with a design that works well on mobile and desktop
• Migrate away from the unfortunately unmaintained static site generation framework WinterSmith, instead use a super simple script that just generates all pages inline.

You can find the code for mijnrealiteit on github, I'll publish the code for this blog soon as well.

It's all live now, as well as super minimal "about me" site on mvr.com. So I can get back to blogging! Will anyone actually read anything I post? I won't know since I removed all trackers. So for now I am screaming into the void.