- Feb 2022
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news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
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I used Publii for my blog, but it was very constraining in terms of its styling
This is a common enough feeling (not about Publii, specifically; just the general concern for flexibility and control in static site generators), but when you pull back and think in terms of normalcy and import, it's another example of how most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people.
Almost no one submitting a paper for an assignment or to a conference cares about styling the way that the users of static site generators (or other web content publishing pipelines) do. Almost no one sending an email worries about that sort of thing, either. (The people sending emails who do care a lot about it are usually doing email campaigns, and not normal people carrying out normal correspondence.) No one publishing a comment in the thread here—or a comment or post to Reddit—cares about these things like this, nor does anyone care as much when they're posting on Facebook.
Somehow, though, when it comes to personal Web sites, including blogs, it's MySpace all over again. Visual accoutrement gets pushed to the foreground, with emphasis on the form of expression itself, often with little relative care for the actual content (e.g. whether they're actually expressing anything interesting, or whether they're being held back from expressing something worthwhile by these meta-concerns that wouldn't even register if happening over a different medium).
When it comes to the Web, most instances of concern for the visual aesthetic of one's own work are distractions. It might even be prudent to consider those concerns to be a trap.
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