The mid-life crisis of a forty-something techno tinkerer
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The Why, the What, and the Wherefore
*Sigh*
If you're of a certain age you may find it hard to believe (though you may know) that there was a time, not so very long ago, when the Web was a very different place. It was all very new, and companies hadn't quite figured out what it was all about; the vast majority of what, today, we call content, was completely user-driven.
The dichotomy between those halcyon days and the Web of today (currently 2025) is stark.
How Did We Get Here
When we examine the current state of play, the Web today is hyper-commercialized. Everything you encounter is geared towards monetization; Google, once a middling Silicon Valley tech company, is no longer a tech company at all. Google is an advertising agency, and what we see on the Web today is the result of this advertising agency having unmitigated control of the WWW landscape. Take, for example, YouTube. Their tagline used to be Broadcast Yourself. In the years since Google's takeover of the platform, their tagline may as well be Give Me All Your Money!
And?
Monetization in and of itself is not the issue. The issue is that the commercial model the Web is currently operated on is unchecked, unbridled and its predatory prevelance in every facet of the Web has given us the bloated, over-engineered network we have today; news sites are replete with intrusive and obnoxious adverts, click-bait headlines designed to entice the user to interact and engage with sites that...
If you view this website in a text-mode browser, such as Links, you will see that it renders beautifully. It gets out of the way completely, and does not restrict the viewers consumption of the content. This is how websites should behave. There shouldn't be a need to accept terms and conditions, cookie consent, data use consent et al. The Web is about providing information to people, not taking information from them. It's a one-way transaction.
By contrast, visit any modern website in Links and you'll find yourself scrolling past useless hyperlinks and meta content before getting to the actual content, which is sparse to say the least.
So, What's the Point?
The point is not to suggest that everyone should be using text-mode Web browsers, but simply to demonstrate the expierence is not optimal; and it serves to demonstrate how bad the modern Web landscape truly is.
My goal with this website is to demonstrate that my 18Kb site holds orders of magnitude more content than any modern 900MB monstrosity. Zero telemetry. Zero scripting. No ads or data collection, ever.
We live in the Information Age, after all. Only, there's depressingly little of it on the modern Web.
This site was built on an M4 Macbook Air, and is powered by a server running Debian Linux 12.