I hate how everything's a fucking video now.

Search for how to do something (in a program/language/recipe/DIY/hobby) and I'm looking for something that's going to list out the handful of steps required to accomplish a task, in text form that I can easily scan back through as required.

But no, everthing's a fucking video now.

Absolutely.

Unless it's the procedure to fix some complex bit of equipment when there will be no video and instruction 7 reads: "The correct widget is usually the outer one. Grasp it firmly and twist more or less in a figure of eight until it clicks loudly. Take great care not to twist any of the other fourteen very similar widgets as this may destroy your device."

Yeah, I think that's part of the problem. *Everything* goes through the web. It swallowed (almost) all other protocols. Everything goes through a web API even when that's a terrible idea. If there were (still) other protocols 'competing' with the web, I think the web would have to be better.

Yeah. The upside of that is that all the weird stuff I used to get lost in on personal websites is now on Youtube. The little channels with 100 followers who do nothing but review car park lifts (actual channel I found, it's great).

Video and podcasts are where the interesting stuff is now. And I *like* those. But I want explorable, text-based places too.

And yeah, tech instructions being video-only is an absolute fucking blight. Totally agree.

(replied to wrong person. I suck at old web)

I hate podcasts, not that I've listened to many. I think I hate the idea of them, I much prefer reading (ok, skimming) and looking at pictures. I mainly use youtube to acquire musics. What I hate most of all is how all websites are CMS, and mostly wordpress. They're really fucking boring. Nobody can code a website anymore, it's all these dumb and highly insecure CMS plugins and addons that are an upgrade nightmare. Don't even get me started on influencers, kill them all.

Yeah I hate all the piss boring CMS websites. Wordpress and Drupal etc. were great in terms of democratising the web, but an absolute pain in the arse to work with. And facilitated the corporate homogenisation of web aesthetics and functions.

And we *really* took a wrong turn databasing everything. A blog site does not need to dynamically create the same fucking page for every user. We realised static generation was a good idea wayyyy too late.

I do love me a podcast though. Perfect for when I'm playing games. 

"but an absolute pain in the arse to work with".

I've put together a couple of "shit" websites as I think of them, because that's what people wanted. That's crap template things that took zero thought. More recently, only a couple of years ago, I took over a Wordpress site that somebody else had built, and reworked it because the users were complaining. I know nothing about website design, but I have a long background in programming, mainly IBM and systems programming, so I thought 'how hard can it be?'

I know why I found/find it a bit of a nightmare. If this isn't taking the thread too far off track I'd love to know what you mean.

In three words -- too much code.

Well, yes. That's what I find. That and FAR too many cooks. For instance, one of the things I wanted was a site menu that gave some sort of hover-over help/explanation for what each choice would do. Was it possible within the default theme? Of course not. But you can have hover-over sub-choices so I ended up building a proper kludge of a menu which at least did what I wanted. Now I see that the latest updates to Wordpress, or Buddypress, or possibly bbPress, have broken the way it works for mobile users. It shouldn't because I haven't contravened any of the rules. But where do you even start when there are a thousand places the problem could be?

As a user I think it's decent. It provides a word-processory interface, which people are comfortable with (word processors were another wrong-turn imo) so they can easily post their posts and get comments and be perfectly happy. It's massively over-engineered for that, but from the user perspective it does it well.

But as a 'dev' working with a client it's horrible. First off, trying to find a theme that does *most* of what they want and they like the general look of. Sending them test-site links, explaining thoroughly that it's just a theme's test-site, and getting "yeah that looks okay but I'll want my name up the top and the text to be purple" back. Finding a theme is a tedious process and it's never perfect, so it'll need customising, which is where it gets *really* bad.

Some themes come with a (non-standardised, of course) widget to change colours and turn features off and on, which is *good*, except that these ones always end up even harder to customise if what you want to change *isn't* covered by the widget.

So to alter the look of the site it's CSS overrides. Which are always a pain. But WP's HTML and CSS are *nasty*, so it's kludges on kludges on kludges. I hate dealing with software where every single fucking goddamn element on the page has its own (unmemorably named) class. The cascading part of CSS really doesn't work in practise except for the most trivial stuff.

But that's all fine compared to altering functionality. In which case you're doing PHP overrides. Which the themes (if I remember correctly) are already overriding, so if you ever want to change themes you're starting from scratch. And Wordpress is made of one million PHP files and finding which ones (often multiple, to do one thing) you need to override to get the functionality you want is literally the worst experience I've ever had working with software.

And of course, all of these alterations are incredibly fragile. When Wordpress *or* the theme updates, any of them could break. So your best option as a 'dev' is to never update, which is a great thing to encourage.

I ended up refusing to deal with CMSes. I did a few sites, towards the end of when I was doing web stuff, with static site generators, usually Jekyll, which was much more pleasant. But only suitable for people who can get their heads around markdown (again, word processors were a fucking mistake). 

But even Jekyll is overly complex now. I ended up, for my own stuff, writing my own static site generator in bash. It's clunky cos I don't know what I'm doing, but it works great for me (and a handful of other people use it, which is gratifying).

I fucking hate wordpress. I wouldn't mind if the end result was amazing but, ultimately, unless you're using it to run an actually dynamic site, what it's doing is pointless. Databasing text so that you can pull it out of the database every time someone visits and dynamically recreate the exact same page for every visitor (yeah, caching will mitigate some of that but still).

As to word processing being a mistake...

The vast majority of what word processing is used for (internal memos, letters and the like) would be better as plaintext. It'd be quicker to write and easier to read.

For most of the rest, where rich formatting is actually required, a (consumer-level) 'DTP'/page setting application would be better. It's telling that most of my friends, when needing to make a flyer or leaflet or whatever, will use Powerpoint/similar rather than a word processor.

For anything that's to be professionally typeset, I'm 100% certain the typesetter would rather work with plaintext documents than word processor output.

And now we've got markdown which does what basic word processing does way better than any word processor, in cases where you want some basic typography.

A world where we'd normalised around plaintext and had nice tools (and things like markdown much earlier) is a nicer world. Hopefully PDFs would never have become a thing.

Yes, that's the kind of thing I thought. I've never (really) been a dev working for a client. To a degree I was one of the clients, plus being the dev trying to get things as wanted. In short, it was a bit of a bugger. Working out what has to be done to get close is a learning curve, but also something of a waste of time, because it will all be different next time, when the theme or the plugins are updated or whatever.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot. All the shit that doesn't work properly in 2024. My site is set up as a site for members using groups, forums, chat etc. So Buddypress/bbPress/Wordpress. All fairly standard. But the handling of posts is infinitely better in Beehive. The pure embarrassment of explaining (again) to somebody who posts from a Word document or Libre Office that their post is full of tags in this part of the site , but not in that part. That their careful paragraph creation is fine here, but missing there... That sometimes their posts vanish altogether because the space-saving hide posts feature is broken sometimes and doesn't display the 'show all posts' option... 

When I was working, I always told clients ip front I could code them a better, more functional, performant, customizable, easily updated, and transferable to different hosting, web site with HTML5 (I used JQuery heavily for bells and whistles, but this would have not meant anything to the client). Clients liked the idea of being to make their own site edits but in truth they would hand it off to developers anyway, after they fucked it up good.

An occurrence that's made extremely likely by the ways that Wordpress with its themes and plugins can be modified. The official ways that is: odd, cumbersome, and varied ways, from mysterious editing functions to directly injecting HTML into a theme (additional CSS). 

These things can usually be patched up, at 10X the time (and cost) of properly formatted, hand-coded source.

This is maybe worth posting

https://indieweb.org/

I miss the Internet without massive Silos too.

That's cool!

Interesting. Is it mainly discussion groups with a charter, a hosting platform, blogging thingy, or roll your own?