This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

I have too many websites. It's because hosting is just so cheap and accessible. We live in a wonderful era for individuals who want to make a place on the web. But, these platforms like Netlify, Deno Deploy, and Fly tempt us with abstractions that confuse simplicity with sustainability. Your HTML page will always live longer than your server-rendered TSX. These platforms make languages like PHP feel outdated when it's just as capable, because it doesn't match the preferred setup of these distributors out of the box. I'm not saying that the distributors system is wrong. It's often easier to work with and keep track of, but one thing that really resonated with me in this article is the burden of the build step. The reason why this site is in PHP is that I can simply write code and let it work. Even my language's blog requires a build step and it's an Astro static site.

Removing the build step is a freeing experience. It lets the content maintainer focus on the content, or adding features. Not unnecessary infrastructure for a blog, personal home page, or reference doc. I think this is an area where the open source community is poorly serving the market. All these frameworks, build systems, and dependencies when the most performant, beautiful, and portable website's I've ever built from a template used vanilla CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.