[cfcef]

What is complicated about it? I'm not sure what you have in mind - there was never any Edenic period where you could run dynamic web blogs for free on your own server without any configuration or investment of time and dedication. All the old tools still exist, but better and polished by time.

Let's compare modern blogging to how you would have blogged in 1996, or when Berners-Lee launched the first documents at CERN, your workflow looked like 'write .html file, FTP to server, Apache serves static files to anyone who visits'. In 2016, your workflow, if you want to, looks like... 'write .html file, SCP to server, nginx serves static files to anyone who visits'. You can still write HTML5 by hand, it's not harder than original HTML (may be easier). You can write Markdown which compiles to HTML with no more fuss than 'markdown.pl foo.md foo.html' or 'pandoc foo.md -o foo.html'.

You don't want to run a server? That's fine, find a host like S3 and instead of 'scp', 's3cmd'. It'll cost you next to nothing compared to back then.

You want some sort of blog software? There must be a million which are not named 'Wordpress' and do not have endless security nightmares. You want static site generators? Likewise, millions. WSIYWG HTML editors? Likewise. Free hosting? At this point almost any large site offers blog-like functionality because hosting is so cheap.

But what is harder? If you want to run your own server, everything is infinitely easy than in 1996. Apt-get may or may not have existed in 1996, but I'm sure it was far less comprehensive and reliable than it is now. You can let your server run for many years without upgrading if you want, and when you do upgrade, it's a few commands. Why, you don't even need to compile a kernel or buy a server edition of your OS. It has never been easier nor cheaper to run your own website in a myriad of different methods. So what exactly has gotten 'so damn complicated'?

The reality is that most people, and especially casuals, do not care that much about high-quality publishing or control or reliability, and instead care more about extreme convenience and network effects, and often either have nothing to say or don't want to say it and so no matter how polished your static site generator is, they couldn't care less. As Yogi Berra said, "if people don't want to go to the ballpark, how are you going stop'em?"

[burningion]

> there was never any Edenic period

Agreed.

I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.

First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.

Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.

> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability

I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.

And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?

What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?

I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.

[cfcef]

> Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.

But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)

And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.

> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.

Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.

> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?

I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.

[thaumasiotes]

> IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking

There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in readability.

(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)

[RamenJunkie_]

The old school static pages are a pain and they are ugly.

My original site on Geocities in 98. I would put up dated posts occasionally. A new new item meant editing the index.html and my "archive" was just all the old posts cut and pasted to an archive.html page. Adding a new navigation link meant editing every page.

For a while I was using shtml for "header" and "footer" files which could be tacked on to individual entry files vut it was still a pain to use. Blog platforms and other CMS systems with editors that keep the content sepersted from the design are definitely better.