ObsoleteNerd.com

It's a pretty well known fact* that the World Wide Web (and arguably humanity itself) peaked in 1999, and it has been downhill ever since. Sure, computers and tech have gotten better "technically" since then, but let's be real, the user experience has gone to crap. Websites went from fun expressions of individual personality and mass sharing of information with the intent of becoming all of humanities knowledge at your finger tips, to gargantuan piles of garbage manufactured to brainwash, manipulate, and destroy society all for the sake of making a few rich people richer.

All of our devices, apps, and appliances spy on us 24/7 and harvest every ounce of data possible. Every interaction with technology is an effort against user-hostile UIs designed specifically to fight you doing what you want to do, and force you to do what they want you to do. Websites went from squeazing out every single possible byte of performance to give you as much content as possible, as fast as possible, to now taking dedicated servers running massive stacks of software with hundreds of dependencies to serve you what could be delivered via a .txt file.

None of this is new to anyone who experienced the before/after of the corporate takeover, but sitting down to rebuild my stale blog so I can get back into sharing some projects made me think about "What does my website need?"... and realising my (and most) websites still need very very little. Yes there's exceptions, Netflix isn't going to work as static HTML, but short of complex web-based interactive applications, a vast majority of websites are still just there to deliver some text and images to the users. You know what does that really well? HTML. Pure, simple, static HTML.

The same HTML that worked in 1999 still works today.

This website works on all hardware, all operating systems, all screen types and sizes, works on all browsers (including text-only, no-JS, screen-readers, etc), loads blazingly fast even on third world country internet (looking at you America) and has very few dependencies, eg zero. It uses your system fonts and sizes so you can change them yourself if you don't like it (CMD/CTRL +/- to change font size in/out in most browsers), it adapts to your device, resolution and window size perfectly because browsers have done that for decades without bloated JS libraries.

I still use modern technologies /building-a-personal-website-using-pelican-and-cloudflare because it's always good to learn new technologies and use them where they're needed, but I used to host this exact same static HTML/CSS from a Raspberry Pi and what the user receives is no different.

This website isn't broken, [it's perfect](https://motherfuckingwebsite.com).

This whole thing is pretty tongue in cheek. I love what modern technology has given us, especially the hardware, portability, etc. But as a web developer and internet addict of 30+ years, I honestly despise where the WWW itself has gone. Back in my day, we hiked to school up hill both wa... I mean, we had to shave every single byte off every single image to make sites load faster and work for more people, and every single pixel "mattered" because it gave the user a better experience. Now you'll get a splash page for a local business that's just text and images, but takes 12 seconds to load on my 1.5Gbps connection with 32 cores and 64Gb of RAM, and my CPU starts heating up my room. Websites designed to give you information went from text-heavy bandwidth-light data havens, to now become monostrous ad-bloated content-light cesspools of user-hostility and corporate greed, injecting literally dozens (sometimes hundreds) of trackers and user-fingerprinting scripts to steal and sell as much of your data as possible.

This website is me giving up on making new websites with new technology, and going back to where I started. It does everything I need, and the user gets everything they need, and nothing they don't... other than some rants from a tired old obsolete nerd.

Now get off my lawn.

*Says the author, who also peaked in 1999 and is therefore a bit biased.