The Ubiquity of Templates

by Charles Miller on October 15, 2001

Jakob Nielsen: End of Homemade Websites. "Most small websites are probably better off with Yahoo's default set-up than anything they could design themselves." (Scripting News)

Another link stolen from Scripting News, but it echoes something I've been thinking lately. Remember a year or two ago, when the web was a little younger, and it was the height of embarrassment to have a website that was generated for you by some tool, rather than written by yourself in emacs? Hasn't that just flipped around completely in the last six months.

It's like at some point, a switch was flipped, and everyone started thinking "What the hell are we doing this for?" And what are we writing websites for? We put stuff up on the web so that the words we write, the links, lists, pictures and thoughts we gather around ourselves can be communicated to the world, or at least those parts of the world we want to show off to.

When writing software, one of the biggest decisions you have to answer is Write or buy? -- Is the stuff that is out there already good enough, is it worth using, or is it more effective to buy your own. Recently, the stuff that's out there has become good enough, the templates flexible enough for us to not feel embarrassed using them.

Enter online journals. Enter blogs. Enter wiki. Enter the world of Content Management. It comes in many forms, but really they all do the same thing - it's no coincidence that Slashdot and Kuro5hin both do journals now, the code was all there, it's just a slightly different angle on it.

All these sites make it easy for you to write something, link to something, fill out a survey, take a picture, propagate a meme, gather opinions, and have it exposed to the world with the least fuss. And then when you're finished with it they take care of archiving what you said so you can get back to it later, without you having to manually update three levels of indexes.

Write or Buy. Not so long ago, the results you got hacking your own site in vi or notepad were so much better than the available alternatives that it was worth spending the extra effort, worth the time updating those indexes by hand and editing file after file when you wanted to change the look of your site. Now you can theme and tweak through text boxes and the CMS takes care of it.

Similarly, I had a moment of inspiration a week or two ago, and started sketching plans to write my ideal blogger/journal/linked nodes/whatever site. I could quite easily write one that suits my needs personally - when you get down to it, the whole thing is just writing views on a database. But... I don't have the time, and why should I bother when I can pay a few bucks a month and get an account on a Manila site, or on LJ?

I run at home. It grabs newsfeeds via RSS from a dozen different sources. It's web-based so I can access it from anywhere. If I spot something interesting then in two clicks I can have it as a link on my weblogger homepage. And it'll look the way I want it to. And when it's old it'll slip off into archive-land on its own. I can post to my livejournal from a little Perl command-line app on my shell account. Ditto.

So here's to never having a real homepage again.

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