Why is My Website a Brutalist Mess?
Since you're visiting my website right now, reading these words, you might have wondered, why my site is such a brutalist mess in terms of styling and layout.
The main reason is that this website is a playground for putting ideas out, and I have a chaotic amalgam of ideas that need to be tested. Those ideas extend to styling (CSS), so the styles are just me messing around with random ideas until I'm happy - which then combine into a brutalist whole.
Apart from that I quite like brutalism as a style, since they often subvert conventions we have about websites while showing off the diversity the medium has to offer. The web style can be more than flat colours, rounded corners, and shadows.
The web (and tech) is also a fast-moving, always evolving beast, so any blog post about technology quickly becomes an outdated artefact of the past. I write about various technologies, and by necessity I'll need to revisit and update posts.
I also link the source code of every page in the bottom, implicitly inviting contributions (or forks), for someone who'd like to comment. Every entry is just a rendered markdown file, so apart from creating an account, updating content should be quite simple.
All of which leads us to a term I've recently read about: Digital gardening. This stream of thought sees websites as small digital gardens tended to by their authors. They reject mainstream 'blogging', putting out finished, perfectioned posts; and rather embrace imperfect, work in progress that are published as they are written.
This really resonates with me, because in order to publish anything, I've had to abandon any desire for perfectionism. I just need to write some thoughts down and hit publish as soon as they're halfway coherent.
And I've recently learned, that this is quite a shame: In fact, as I was migrating my old blog from Google's blogger to this site, I've found quite a few semi-written, un-published posts that would have been quite interesting and valuable today (for instance, me writing thoughts about some machine learning papers in 2018 with quite some relevance for 2025). So, I'm salty I've never published that - though admittedly, I've at most written some random scribbles that probably wouldn't have met the bar of being "coherent".
Overall, I've started to publish faster, with less focus on perfectionism, just posting ideas as they grow. The IndieWeb / Digital Gardens movements gives me some ideas how to better do so. It actually starts with styling: currently my website is so brutalist, that there aren't even styles for links. A hypertext website hiding (instead of showing) hyperlinks is probably subverting expectations a bit too much.
The IndieWeb itself focuses more on UX/Design in that they have simple, beautiful websites, whereas this site is more brutalist in approach. On the other hand, I've read about the IndieWeb POSSE, where everyone can read my blog posts wherever they happen to be, which is admittedly the best UX of all - completely reducing the barriers of entry. I think by engaging in POSSE, I can "publish" what I think is worth publishing, providing a good UX to the readers while preserving the identity if this site.
Apart from that, this site has a lot of potential left. For instance, all the blog posts have (multiple) tags, but there's no way of filtering them. Links between posts are also lacking (aparts from the lacking link styling). I have a lot of ideas written down, and only a few posts published. Stay tuned for what's next and how the site will evolve!