I guess some of these recent trends of the web just bother me.

I've never liked the word "blog." See, I've been post­ing my words on the web since before doing so became cool, and now every­one and their cat has some kind of blog, thanks to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of ser­vices like Blog­ger and Live­Jour­nal, etc. I don't under­stand why it's has become such an in thing to do. Come on, peo­ple. Paper has been around for quite some time, and it's not like every­one just went, "Holy fuck! We bet­ter start writ­ing now before we run out!"

So what is it about post­ing writ­ing on the inter­net that's seemed to make it so pop­u­lar? I mean, when I get an e-mail from some idiot attack­ing me for some­thing I say on the web, chances are it's because I know them, or at least know of them. Most peo­ple who "blog" don't get the same cour­tesy. Usu­ally it's com­plete strangers who either agree with them or vehe­mently dis­agree. I'm all for imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion, but most of what's said on the web—at least in response to some­one else's thoughts—is just so resound­ingly neg­a­tive. Why sub­ject your­self to such degredation?

Heh, masochists.

I've started to notice that spi­ders for blog list­ing ser­vices have been attack­ing my site with a fer­vor that's nor­mally reserved for Google. For g*d sakes, why? Those ser­vices must assume their busi­ness model on a par­tic­u­lar group of indi­vid­u­als who do noth­ing but sit at their PCs and look for inter­est­ing per­sonal sites to read in order to fill the void caused by hav­ing noth­ing inter­est­ing to talk about in their own lives. That's my best guess, at least.

Now granted, I've met some of my best friends in the world through their web­sites. And if I hap­pen upon a site that I find inter­est­ing, I'll check in on it from time to time. Usu­ally, this is by acci­dent. What I'm say­ing is there's a clear line between find­ing inter­est­ing reads occa­sion­ally and lurk­ing on as many as you can get ahold of just because you need some­thing to do.

What I really don't under­stand is the more recent "lin­klog" phe­nom­e­non. Okay, so you want a site to post your thoughts, rants, etc. All fine and good. But do it, then! Don't post a ridicu­lous amount of links to your site per day just because you don't have any­thing else to say. This site is often quiet for just that rea­son. I will go long amounts of time with­out post­ing an entry here, and I do it because I can. I do it because I'm not on any kind of quota sys­tem. I don't get paid by the word, so I fig­ure, why push myself? Exactly.

There are a cou­ple of sites that I read because I enjoy what those peo­ple have to say. But some of them have taken to post­ing link after link after link—all with very lit­tle com­men­tary about the links (or none at all), why they're impor­tant or even what pur­pose they serve. I'm read­ing these sites less now.

I know, I know. It's your site and only you decide what to post to it. I sub­scribe to the same the­ory, so I'm not going to sit here and tell peo­ple what to post and not to post to their own spe­cial web space. Here's one gentleman's opin­ion on the sub­ject. I guess I just don't under­stand it is all.

And then there's all this web stan­dards hullabaloo.

When I designed the most recent ver­sion of this site, I remem­ber think­ing to myself, "Gee, if I don't throw a table in here, this just won't look right." Now, I've never con­sid­ered myself a web­site "designer," per se. I've mostly been happy with the more sub­tle moniker of "devel­oper." I'll be the first per­son to tell you that I don't really have an eye for design—I just know what looks nice to me. And, when I'm redesig­ing a per­sonal site, that's usu­ally my only con­cern. Then I thought about that dreaded <table> and thought that using such a frame­work would be con­sid­ered a step back in the minds of those who are mov­ing for an all-CSS, super-standard Web.

When the hell, exactly, did I start think­ing in these terms?!

There is one table on Ret­ro­specti­cus as of this writ­ing. Sure, I thought about web stan­dards and CSS-based design, and then I thought, "Who the hell cares?" How I want this to look will super­sede exactly how it gets done, and that's all that mat­ters. And shortly after v.11 was pub­lished, I ran across this entry on Dave Shea's mez­zoblue site, which fur­ther cemented my opinion.

I share many of Noah's thoughts about this, but let me put it this way. Erm, what the fuck?!

Yes, v.11 hap­pens to val­i­date as XHTML. Why? Because I felt like it. But did I make a point to do it that way? Hell no. And just because I did it this time, does that mean that every site I build from now until the end of time will cor­rectly val­i­date just so my site can fit in? Fuck no—it's not worth the time. And yes, there's a table on this site. A thou­sand pardons—oh mas­ters of the Web—but you know what? Oh well. And yeah, this site does have syn­di­ca­tion feeds. Why? Because the fea­ture hap­pens to be built in to the pub­lish­ing soft­ware I use. If that weren't the case, would I miss it? No way.

I sup­pose my bot­tom line is this: When­ever peo­ple become zealots about any­thing, many times they take the sit­u­a­tion to a point where things just stop being fun. So my code doesn't val­i­date? Well fuck you, I'm gonna keep it like that. That's right, just to piss you off.

Calm down, peo­ple. In the grand scheme of things, it's truly not that important.