I was at WordCamp US recently and my takeaway was wow everyone is talking about ai a lot. And also wow everything feels very complicated. And then Ma.tt said in the last session/fireside chat two things like he was reading my mind: maybe we’re focusing too hard on ai and we need to simplify. And I was like “WOW. Yes, please.” (He also just wrote a post telling WordCamp attendees to learn about more ai that included 13 links… I dunno. It’s good, it’s bad, it’s the opposite of simple. 🤷🏼♂️)
The last session I attended was by Miriam Schwab, ‘The Agentic Web is Coming — Is WordPress Ready?” She starts by discussing all the ways she made her website ready for agents, then she tested it and the agent ignored everything she had added and went right to the content. That was not what any of us were expecting after listening to two days of ai sessions. Her surprising answer to an audience question about where all this is headed was, “Agents aren’t waiting around for us all to agree that we should have this certain functionality on our site. They just work with what they have. Which is our messy, colorful, weird internet, and they make the best of it … keep building for humans in the best way possible.”
Our messy, colorful, weird internet is the best thing I heard during the conference. Lets create things for humans by humans. The stranger the better. I would love for everyone with a hobby or side project or small biz or just a thing they want to say to have a website. Please don’t give it all away to social media sites run by mega-gazillionaires and punishing algorithms. Please don’t pour every last drop of everything good into ai to strain all the humanness out of it.
If you want to build a website right this minute for free sign up for neocities.org, it feels so old school there in the best way. Put your words and art up first thing and build the rest as you go. Use ai to write html and css to get you started—it’s ok! Keep it so simple and fun. Remember that ai is tech support and you’re the boss and creative director, you’re the one full of unique thoughts and ideas. When you’re ready, buy a domain and some cheap server space. If you want to have your own WordPress site, yessss do it! If you’re totally lost in how to start I’ll help, tell me all about it in the comments. 🖤
PS. My first website was a blog about planner templates, it’s still up but neglected. I could write posts all day back then, especially random tutorials nobody asked for, and I loved it. Lately I’ve been wanting to write again like I did back then just out into the ether about whatever is on my mind. So, here I am! I’m not going to edit it much or worry about where the commas go because guess what? Lets bring typos back and run-on sentences. One human to another.
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