To the Marrow
September 27, 2022

A few months ago, I began simplifying this website[1], getting rid of
backgrounds, style sheets--just about anything that wasn't text. In 
the process of researching simple websites, I stumbled across such places
as the 1MB club[2], the No CSS club[3], and even the 1K club[4]. I was
fascinated by the creativity and simplicity of many of these websites.

One, in particular, that caught my eye was the website of Tanner Collins[5].
He'd used <pre> tags in html to create a pre-formatted, text-file looking
website. So for fun, I went and re-did my own website entirely in the same
style; however, life events kept me busy for the next couple of months
and I never put it online.

Last week, though, another troll through the various mega- and kilo-byte 
clubs led me to Brad Taunt's[6] website and his "shinobi" blogging project[7].
Following one of the footnoted links there led me to Len Falken's article
"Writing for the Internet across a Human Lifetime[8]" and as I read it, I 
found myself nodding in agreement with his philosophy: plain text is good
enough for most purposes. (I've long been a fan of plain text: easy to
write, easy to read, program and (semi-) operating-system independent, 
information-dense.)

I also found myself agreeing with the stylistic choice of putting links in
a document's footnotes. Like a lot of people, I've wasted more time than I 
care to count by link-hopping from some interesting article to another to 
another. Many a pleasurable hour has been frittered away in this way. 
But with footnoted links, you have to want to see link's target bad enough 
to highlight it, then right click to get "Open link in other tab." I found 
that extra moment of decision helped stop me from just randomly following 
link after link after link; an opportunity I realized should also be 
afforded to the however many readers of this blog.

So if my last website update was cutting down to the bone, this one is
cutting down to the marrow. We'll see how well this new format works 
over the next few weeks and months.


[1] https://www.andrewgudgel.com/blog/to-the-bone.txt
[2] https://1mb.club
[3] https://nocss.club
[4] https://1kb.club
[5] https://t0.vc
[6] https://cv.tdarb.org
[7] https://shinobi.website
[8] https://len.falken.directory/misc/writing-for-the-internet-across-a-human-lifetime.txt

(c) 2022 Andrew Gudgel
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com