2019! As everyone else is greeting the new year with positivity and optimism for the future, I’m taking the contrary position and sharing some rather backward-facing articles.
Jason Koebler at Vice reminiscences about his old Tripod homepage (I had one of those!), and wonders whether he should rejuvenate it.
We should replace Facebook with personal websites
There’s a subtext of the #deleteFacebook movement that has nothing to do with the company’s mishandling of personal data. It’s the idea that people who use Facebook are stupid, or shouldn’t have ever shared so much of their lives. But for people who came of age in the early 2000s, sharing our lives online is second nature, and largely came without consequences. There was no indication that something we’d been conditioned to do would be quickly weaponized against us.
Wired’s Jason Kehe takes a step back from his iPhone.
Going dumb: My year with a flip phone
I felt like a wholer person. My mind was reabsorbing previously offloaded information and creating new connections. I was thinking more and better. My focus was improving. I thought I was breaking through.
In the end, I was not.
(He chooses a Kyocera phone, though I think we can all agree this was the best phone of its time.)
Web designer Andy Clarke shares the techniques he would have used back in 1998 to lay out a website — frames, tables and spacer gifs. Remember them?
Designing your site like it’s 1998
The height and width of these “shims” or “spacers” is only 1px but they will stretch to any size without increasing their weight on the page. This makes them perfect for performant website development.
Of course, these days we’re certain we know a much better way of doing all this. And that’s his point.
Strange as it might seem looking back, in 1998 we were also certain our techniques and technologies were the best for the job. That’s why it’s dangerous to believe with absolute certainty that the frameworks and tools we increasingly rely on today—tools like Bootstrap, Bower, and Brunch, Grunt, Gulp, Node, Require, React, and Sass—will be any more relevant in the future than elements, frames, layout tables, and spacer images are today.
What will all this look like in the next 20 years?
Miscellaneous Details 