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# Blogs
Why would I start a blog in 2022? The short answer is
that I have recently enjoyed reading blog posts, and I thought it could be fun
to write some too. I don't have a good long answer, so I am just going to write
some random, loosely related thoughts in this post.
## A history of the Web, starting from somewhere in the middle
Once upon a time, the World Wide Web was a place where people could freely
share infomation in the form of
[hypertext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext).
Now it is a sort of universal application framework, largely run by
advertising companies.
In the last few months I have been reading, watching videos and thinking
about this change. I feel a sort of nostalgia for "the good old days" of the
Internet, although I did not experience most of them in person.
My first encounter with the Internet was in the early 2000's. My parents
were trying to set up a dial-up connection at home, and they told me very
clearly that I should not touch the phone for the following few minutes. Why
would a 7-8 year old want to use phone, if not because his parents explicitly
told him not to? So of course I picked it up and put it back down multiple
times, listening with curiosity to what many people my age and older remember
as "the Internet sound". My parents spent a lot of time troubleshooting that
day.
I only have a couple of memories of that dial-up connection - I was of course
not allowed to use it alone! I remember downloading a couple of pictures from
the official Pokémon website, which we later printed and hung somewhere.
I also remember trying to send an email to my dad, and my mom being
clearly stressed about me typing slowly and wasting minutes of dial-up time.
I really started using the Internet around 2006 or 2007. It was the time of
forums. I liked forums, because you could talk about specific topics with
people with common interests, and also browse old threads and learn
without intereacting directly with people.
Then social media arrived, and at first I liked those too. I made a Facebook
account in late 2009, and found it a convenient way to communicate with
my friends and classmates. Nowadays my Facebook feed seems more like a
collection of posts by people or pages I don't know that some old
friend commented on, and I think this is why I have basically stopped
posting there.
Anyways, later came smartphones - I got my first one in 2012 - and "apps".
This used to be just a fancy word for "smartphone program", but apps quickly
became the new way of accessing the Internet. Apps, and WebApps, now *are*
the Internet, and have been so for the last 10 years or so. We now work
on documents on the cloud, have video calls and share social media posts
via apps - or browsers - that need at least modern, but preferably
modern *and powerful*, hardware to run on, but are at the same time
totally dependent on some huge server or data center somewhere else in the
world. Of course, these services are run by the few huge companies that
can afford to develop and mantain such a system.
## So what now?
I think it is cool that one can do all these things with the web. It is also
nice that the modern Internet is very accessible: anyone can sign up to any
social media platform they like and start sharing whatever they like, with
little to no barrier of entry.
But I think that we don't need all of this all the time.
We should not need an expensive modern device running a
[30 million lines of code](https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031)
to get some basic information from the web.
If people could put together a couple of lines of HTML in the 90's, we
can still do it today.
It would be nice to keep the "old Internet" alive.
Small websites with interesting information on whatever the owner decides
to talk about, no accounts, no subscriptions, no fancy endlessly-scrollable
home pages making your PC fan spin like your house is on fire.
The kind of websites that you can read and even create on a 13 year old
[netbook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook) - like I am doing now!
"This is cool, I would like to do it too but..."
* "...I don't know how" - Head to the
[MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Learn) and start learning!
* "...I don't know what to write about" -
Read [this short blog post](https://www.romanzolotarev.com/website.html).
## This blog
I have a few ideas on what to blog about. Mainly open source software and
related things. I don't think I'll write much about personal stuff.
In any case I will keep posting at a very irregular pace - don't expect
regular new "content"!
I think I'll keep writing in English - it is not my first language, but
writing in my mother tongue would immediately exclude 99% of possible
readers. And for the technical stuff I want to talk about it
does not make a big difference anyway.
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