Or not.
My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation. It had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. —
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
AKA:
How I feel after not updating Designing With Web Standards or writing a new book since 2013.
AND:
And also how I feel now that there’s no longer a single, agreed-upon digital town square (and, further, now that the biggest one, where I once enjoyed a hefty following for some pixel pusher, has turned into a N*zi bar, where I no longer choose to spend time).
And since Covid killed the conference I co-founded, and I cut way back on travelling and giving conference talks and focused on paying off the debts we were left with.
And since financial reality forced us to kill our publishing company, too. So many nice things, all gone.
I had the world, or at least a wee piece of it, by the eyeballs, and, not entirely by my own choice, bit by bit, I let it go.
Kinda depressing, sure. But also, and mainly, pretty liberating.
I also learned something about people and friendship, and remembered something about the passing of all things.
8 replies on “Staying relevant”
FWIW, I always stayed tuned in and appreciate your POV with or without the conferences and books etc. Keep it up! 💪
I’m still a very active twitter/x poster and I think there is something else going on. The new algorithms focuses too much on engagement and have turned what used to be “social media” into “entertainment media”. This is what destroyed the ability to have public conversations with people in your space. And when only engagement matters, nazi content naturally rises up, just like cat videos.
@Ogbechinho: That is profoundly true. I agree. Thank you for sharing!
Wasn’t aware of the difficulties that came since, but your book was a real inspiration, just at the time I needed it. I had taken a course that was supposed to qualify me as a webmaster. But at the end of the course the instructor said that unfortunately the profession known as “webmaster” had ceased to exist, as it had already split up into a number of more specialized fields. // I dropped Twitter maybe a decade ago, but love your posts on Mastodon / Fedi, where I found the link to this article.
This was beautiful Admin. Thank you for your reflections.
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Hi Jeffrey. Like you, I felt like a pioneer and bought the first edition of Designing with Web Standards—it resonated! As things progressed, I found jQuery and Bootstrap useful, but then frameworks exploded and thumped web standards. Websites became overly complicated to craft—I gave up and moved on to other things. I was laid-off recently, I wanted to build a personal site to showcase past projects and design thinking ideas in hopes of finding more meaningful work. I wanted a versatile framework that wasn’t complicated. I discovered something that has me excited—Nue (nuejs.org)—you came to mind immediately! Check it out if you haven’t already. It’s kind of bleeding edge, but at the same time, totally retro.