Unpolished human websites

Every day I am more and more annoyed by the way some of the blogs I have followed for years have started to “get with the times” or “catch up” on using those “tools” to “improve” their blogging in one way or another.

I don’t even want to use those two letters, or the more appropiate three-letter acronym, because honestly, it annoys me to even type it out at this point. What a pain.

I’ll share some things that shouldn’t need to be said, but in just in case, here’s what a personal website does not need:

• Perfect grammar.
• Up to date posts.
• Links to everything it talks about.
• Clear structure.
• Posts with catchy titles.
• Fancy thumbnails or images.
• Perfect “SEO”.

Sure, editing is okay, rewording is okay, humans make mistakes, humans can correct those mistakes. If you are too lazy to correct a mistake, just leave it there then, it’s your blog, you write what you want and skip the rest.

I could go through every point here but it all boils down to the same thing. Just express yourself.

I admit I fell for these new and “innovative” technologies at some point, there’s even a blogpost I did years ago that’s barely written by me. I refuse to delete it for the sake of posterity, but I also won’t link it because it’s kind of cringe. Other than that, these words are mine, this is my voice.

Since we are at it, here’s what I like to find in a personal website:

• Your unique experience and view of life.
• Harmless grammar mistakes.
• Misstyped urls.
• Incomplete sentences.
• Multiple posts about the same thing.
• Drafts published by accident.
• Vague titles that have nothing to do with the topic.
• Honest and human thoughts.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have something a little bit more proper or elegant, there is tooling out there that has allowed for that to be possible for decades now. Tools to help you write and edit your posts properly without having to rely on those things. And even if there were not, how is it that books have been a thing for hundreds of years. handwritten, printed, whatever, all of it was done by a real person.

Maybe it’s slow and tedious, maybe it takes more manual effort, maybe it’s the “boring part” that you don’t like. Other than accessibility—and I still have my doubts about how truly accessible this is—it mostly boils down to putting in the effort.

There are, maybe, valid reasons for it all. I am not really unfollowing those that use it, like some others have, but I can’t get the feeling out of my head, that I am no longer reading a human sometimes, and that they are mostly excusing themselves, precisely because at least there’s a feeling there, that it’s wrong.

Regardless of what you do, on this website, it’s just me, here and now. Me and my dumb takes and opinions, my rambles about nothing and my thoughts on things everyone has mentioned before, but it doesn’t really matter does it? Because I am the one writing. Helplessly human, helplessly unpolished, imperfect and wrong, but documenting it all because it’s just fun for me.

Like, look at this post, it’s kind of ugly, it sounds like I’m bragging, and I hate that, I’m not doing anything special, it’s just another blogpost out of the hundreds of blogposts I’ve done, out of the hundreds of millions of articles written by humans.

So, yeah, write your own words, or don’t, you are entitled to do—or avoid doing—whatever you wish.

What I want, however, is to read you.