and every year it gets harder. you can skip this post, i'm just an old man yelling at cloud.

i wrote like 8,000 words about how much i hate trying to make websites in the modern world and got so mad and disgusted that i just abandoned it. then i tried to write something nicer and that didn't work either. the best i can manage is not being outright vitriolic

i should be able to host my own blog where i can write posts in a WYSIWYG editor, not in goddamn markdown, and where i can drag images into the editor to upload and embed them. it's pathetic that what we could do with frontpage in 1998 is no longer possible with any available tooling, and it's because the only two parties that exist in the website creation space at this point are

1. hypercorporation offering you a Web App designed to generate one of 8 possible sites, all based on massive and hideous templates intended to make your local plumbing company look like a fortune 500 with tons of parallax-effect static images and pull quotes and shit like that. each page load is 8-12 megs and takes over 40 seconds on gigabit internet and an i9
2. Computer People who say “just use a static site generator. all you have to do is SSH into your server (you DO carry the same laptop with you everywhere, right?) and type up everything in markdown, then run a command to generate your site, then go load the site in a browser and drill down to the page you just created in order to find out what it looks like, then repeat that every single time you make a change. what do you mean you want to embed images? huh. sounds weird. well if you really want that, it's easy: simply create thumbnails by hand in photoshop, give every image a unique filename by hand, manually upload them to your server, then write a chunk of line noise like:

   (images/j2me_game_1_1.png)[!(images/thumbs/j2me_game_1_1.png)[screenshot of j2me game 1]]

   “simply do this 24 times if you want 24 images. if you make a typo, you'll find out when the image doesn't load!”

yes i know some ssg's try to smooth over parts of this. i don't care, it's not enough, i fundamentally hate the way they work and it is a massive impedance to me getting anything done, no discussion, this is not up for debate. i just fucking want to see what i'm working on without a six step process, the way i could with frontpage or dreamweaver or microsoft expressions, twenty five fucking years ago.

now i'm not surprised that group #1 won't help me out here; they obviously hate that i exist because i am not a profit center. i understand them completely, and i don't despise them, they are simply my mortal enemies because they have to be.

group #2 bugs me though, because they should be on my side, or at least nod and go “oh yeah, i don't have time to make that for you, but i get why you'd want it. good luck man.” instead they act like i shit in their soup when i don't want to use fucking Jekyll, and idk why. i think i'm being pretty reasonable here, wanting a thing i could do when i was 13, which was 50 times faster than any of this hacking-the-mainframe horseshit, to simply continue being possible. but it isn't, and i've given up, so it's time to compromise.

what i need is a page which i can open in any browser, on any computer i am sitting at, just by remembering the URL and a login. this used to exist, but i went through every single piece of blogging software, and - yeah, it's over scoobs. ten years ago there were dozens of packages that were just, “here's some php or python you can use instead of wordpress to make a site that works like blogger,” but they're all dead.

there are FOSS packages that come up if you google this, but of the ones that aren't long-abandoned, they're all… weird. like i can't even remember names so i won't name them, it's too much effort, but very few actually SAY they're for blogging, and of the ones that do, they all felt like they existed in opposition to some other thing, just out of frame, with which i was unfamiliar. they also usually wanted to run on like cloudflare or S3 or something, instead of a normal server? useless to me.

mostly though, i just… didn't find any blogging software, at all. i found activitypub stuff (don't talk to me about activitypub, i am not interested in anything social-media-shaped) and i found things for like, “note taking,” and various “wikis,” all of which claimed they could be beaten into blog shape, but they were all fiendishly complicated and obviously intended to fight me at every turn. yes, i COULD make blogs with these, but they did not WANT to be blogs, and the instructions for how to make them act like blogs were lengthy, convoluted, and felt like they all had the subtext “okay, you can do this, but why would you want to.” also, none of them looked like blogs. they looked like work. every “webapp” looks like work now, and nobody is going to read my posts on a site that looks like a Sharepoint.

the sole exception seemed to be some node.js thing called Ghost, which almost looked promising, but no matter what anyone tells you, installing a node.js app is no different than running an .exe in windows: it's a completely uninspectable black box that simply expects a given environment and explodes if it doesn't get it.

on windows though, API support has been basically unbroken for over 30 years, so at worst you need to install a runtime that's trivial to find, takes two minutes to install, and then simply works. node.js however is a fragile china doll with infinite dependencies, and i have never gotten it working in any environment without a lengthy struggle. usually it demands “libDickSmasher v2.0 or higher”, so i install libDickSmasher 2.1, and then it says i don't have v2.0 or higher. or, it tries to run and crashes, because they broke the API between minor revs 2.0 and 2.1. and downgrading to 2.0 isn't possible because something else demands 2.1. etc etc etc

in the case of my shared webhosting situation, it's even better: i literally cannot make this work because all the commands from the ghost documentation just make the interpreter dump a trace and exit with an inscrutable error about not being able to create a thread or some other gibberish like that. googling gets nothing except a suggestion that i have inadequate perms; who's surprised, since node.js is an enormous tentacle monster that expects total control of the system it's running on. fuck that.

do not mention containers to me unless you're wearing a cup. and no, i do not want to run a VPS. my first website was on shared hosting in 2003, and you can't tell me that 21 years later we have slid so far backwards that i now need to feed and care for apache myself just in order to have any presence on the web at all. that's stupid, and it's also just plain wrong.

CGI still works, it has always worked, and it has always been the ideal way to make a website. sure, it doesn't scale well to actual “apps”; that's good, i hate “apps.” i have a website, and CGI is perfect for that. it allows just enough complexity to make it easy to update your site without any external tools, and to have things like automatic indexes and search. yes, if you overreach you end up with wordpress - so don't do that, and you'll be fine.

there are CGI websites, and in particular PHP websites, which have been continuously functioning since i was twelve years old. i am not too good for this. in fact, it's all i can really handle.

everything more ambitious than a PHP script requires you to have a PhD from fucking NASA and breaks if you don't constantly feed and care for it. all the node.js Apps and virtually all the SSGs are so complex that your only options are to either treat them as total black boxes, or adjust your brains entire neural geometry to understand their particular ecosystem, and i just don't have the brainspace for it. the beauty of CGI apps is that i can understand them well enough to hack in the features i need without comprehending how the whole enchilada is assembled - and more importantly, eight months from now when i need to fix something, but i've completely forgotten everything i'd learned, i can relearn it all in a couple hours, because it's not a massive App built on Frameworks with Models and Views and all this other incomprehensible dogshit that people only use because they want to be able to Scale to Enterprise Workloads.

i am sick of being told i should care about Enterprise Workloads. i am sick of everyone telling me that i should use their tool because it “scales.” i am not a corporation, i am not interested in getting millions of pairs of eyes on my website, i just want to put text and images on a page without having to assemble and operate a whole Toolchain. when did we give up on the idea that computers should make things easier? when did everyone decide that “1987 greentext unix machine” was the pinnacle of computing? i don't know, but i refuse to accept it.

so here i am. back in 2008, when things worked. back on dokuwiki. sigh. this goddamn thing. i'll write more about it in another post