No pictures today, because in my new timetable Monday is a web day. I did an audit of what technology I’m using for each site and realised I have made the same site several times with different technologies. With my CV in mind, I thought I’d upload the code to GitHub and deploy all the test sites on GitHub pages.
The first site was Uncle Cliff’s Attic, which I plan to make with Drupal, but at the moment is just static HTML pages. I plan to use Drupal to keep my hand in with it – the experience will be useful on my CV. But I also have a Next.js version of the site, which I tried to publish on GitHub pages. Wow, did that turn out to be a wretched experience!
I followed tutorial after tutorial and none of it worked. I was thinking it was my workflow file that was the problem, but after several hours of trial and error, I discovered that the build process wasn’t working properly. Even my local copy wasn’t exporting a static site. At this point I gave up and deleted the repo.
The next site to try was Why Pictures Work, which I’d also made a Next.js version of. It was in a more recent version of Next.js, with the app directory. That didn’t make a difference, unfortunately, because it wouldn’t deploy to GitHub pages or to Vercel. Both sites looked fine locally. Making a website really shouldn’t be this complicated.
I looked at my simple static page version of the sites and laughed. The web is capitalism on steroids. It continually disrupts itself, and so does web technology. Luckily, the basic technology like HTML, CSS and Javascript is not driven by commercial interests, but many of the layers on top of that are, like Next.js and Gatsby. Each of these upper layers needs to keep changing to show how cutting edge they are, and what cool new features they have, and they need to ridicule older technologies to convince web developers that they are not doing “modern” or “best practice” development unless they use these products.
But it’s a mind game, a peer pressure strategy that appeals to those who want to see themselves as state-of-the-art and among the progressive elite. The goal is to convince people not only that these products are best practice, but also that they’re an “awesome experience” to use. That’s what’s laughable: they’re horrible to use, and blatantly driven by commercial interest. It’s only vanity that would make you use them. It’s not about building simple, sustainable sites that meet the customer needs, it’s about being cool and of course, for the technology owners, making money.
Still, it’ll be good for my CV and I might try again.