There’s not enough words in the English language to describe how cool it is to build a little publishing machine. That rare, lightning-in-a-bottle feeling of throwing a few services together and building something greater than the sum of its parts. For example: last night I was polishing the final touches of The Cascade, a fresh new blog about CSS and front-end development—look!—
—and I realized that I have so much power at my fingers! I started daydreaming about vast, independent publishing empires rising and falling before me with just a few links to Stripe and Memberful (and a sprinkling of HTML). After I recovered from my reverie I had built a functional membership program.
That’s...incredible!
With a bit more effort I had synced blot.im with Dropbox so that I have a folder on my desktop where I can quickly drag and drop files and—boom!—that page then gets instantly published onto the world wide web. There’s no need to integrate a complicated CMS, or use Git to sync files between things, or configure some hidden, demonic config file to get WordPress hooked up properly.
I stood up after an intense bout of CSS-ing and it felt like all these things just sort...of...sang together? In harmony! With pretty minimal effort I had built a website that doesn’t make me want to sigh and roll my eyes but instead it felt like putting on a pair of new running shoes: everything was easy to untangle if I need to change anything or switch one service out for another. Everything was light.
This website isn’t dependent on some big framework or some far-flung CSS postprocessor and I’m not using some big database I half understand and I definitely don’t have to worry about it all breaking if I ignore the codebase for six months. I can count all the dependencies on one hand.
Light, I tell you!
This reminds me, in front-end circles I’ve noticed a bit of a fetish with complexity where folks will often look down upon you if you’re using simple HTML instead of some JavaScript hydration package that takes five mins to load. Although— perhaps!—I’ll regret the simplicity of my setup when things get more complicated, for now it feels as lightweight as a web publishing experience can be.
That’s really what I was looking for when I was building The Cascade all this week: lightness in publishing. I wanted to make sure that nothing would get between me and a blog post because I expect I’ll publish a few notes every day. And if that process is even remotely painful then it might make me not want to contribute to it at all.
(I think a lotta folks don’t write for their blog simply because their publishing process makes them roll their eyes and sigh loudly.)
So I was looking at the current state of CMSs and I noticed that they don’t seem to have gotten any simpler since I last took a look at them. They’re all very complicated! Blot.im was the only one that gave me the control that I wanted over every line of code, whilst also getting out the way and letting me publish things quickly. I’m sure I’m the outlier here and all of these tools solve very different problems but—to this blogger’s eye—they appear to be chasing a broad range of features instead of going deep into making the humble act of publishing simple and easy.
All this made me realize that the first goal of any project on the web should be this: can we make it easier to publish than FTP? Drag and drop! Not every website needs to be so gosh darn complicated, not every blog needs to be rendered in a WebGL house of cards. And we should all honor and respect lightness in web design instead.
(I am being mean and hyperbolic here but it’s definitely how modern front-end development feels, generally.)
Anyway, thanks for listening to this rant about publishing on the web. I am really, truly excited about The Cascade and how I can continue to improve it slowly over time. And I’ll be sure to report back about how lightweight this publishing process is over the long run.
Again, here’s the link: csscade.com
Onwards! And with lightness!
✌️ Robin