Journal tags: professional

When I wrote about democratising dev, I made brief mention of the growing “no code” movement:

Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.

But I didn’t describe what no-code is, as I understand it.

I’m taking the term at face value to mean a mechanism for creating a website—preferably on a domain you control—without having to write anything in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any back-end programming language.

By that definition, something like WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress itself) is a no-code tool:

Create any kind of website. No code, no manuals, no limits.

I’d also put Squarespace in the same category:

Start with a flexible template, then customize to fit your style and professional needs with our website builder.

And its competitor, Wix:

Discover the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want.

Webflow provides the same kind of service, but with a heavy emphasis on marketing websites:

Your website should be a marketing asset, not an engineering challenge.

Bubble is trying to cover a broader base:

Bubble lets you create interactive, multi-user apps for desktop and mobile web browsers, including all the features you need to build a site like Facebook or Airbnb.

Wheras Carrd opts for a minimalist one-page approach:

Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.

All of those tools emphasise that don’t need to need to know how to code in order to have a professional-looking website. But there’s a parallel universe of more niche no-code tools where the emphasis is on creativity and self-expression instead of slickness and professionalism.

neocities.org:

Create your own free website. Unlimited creativity, zero ads.

mmm.page:

Make a website in 5 minutes. Messy encouraged.

hotglue.me:

unique tool for web publishing & internet samizdat

I’m kind of fascinated by these two different approaches: professional vs. expressionist.

I’ve seen people grapple with this question when they decide to have their own website. Should it be a showcase of your achievements, almost like a portfolio? Or should it be a glorious mess of imagery and poetry to reflect your creativity? Could it be both? (Is that even doable? Or desirable?)

Robin Sloan recently published his ideas—and specs—for a new internet protocol called Spring ’83:

Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.

It’s not a no-code tool (you need to publish in HTML), although someone could easily provide a no-code tool to sit on top of the protocol. Conceptually though, it feels like it’s an a similar space to the chaotic good of neocities.org, mmm.page, and hotglue.me with maybe a bit of tilde.town thrown in.

It feels like something might be in the air. With Spring ’83, the Block protocol, and other experiments, people are creating some interesting small pieces that could potentially be loosely joined. No code required.

When Richard talks, I listen. That’s a lesson I learned even before Clearleft existed. Right now Richard is talking about civility online mentioning the specific example of Digg—something I’ve touched on in the past.

If there’s any truth to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory then anonymity online can exacerbate the lack of civility. A key issue here is identity: you’re more likely to be rude or aggressive when posting an anonymous comment on a blog post than when you’re posting to your own blog—a place that’s associated with you and your online identity.

Just to be clear, when I talk about identity here I’m not talking about the issue of consolidating scattered online identities (a job for OpenID and, to a certain extent, microformats). I’m talking about identity as a basis for trust.

In order for an opinion to carry any weight online, the person posting needs to establish trust. A lot of the time this simply involves providing background material: “this is me, here are my photos, here are my bookmarks, etc.”

If you can’t provide a backstory, it’s becomes very hard to establish trust. Take for example the recent discourse on Flickr when some asshats ripped off Dan’s logo. To begin with, everyone was quite rightly joining the fray in support of Dan—with the exception of the Chief Executive Asshat from the rip-off company. But then some people showed up and started taking the side of the asshat. The other commentators did some quick’n’dirty background checks by simply clicking on the usernames and found empty photo pages. This lack of history pointed pretty strongly to these people simply being sock puppets.

But if your history establishes your identity and consequently your trustworthiness, then how can you instil trust if you’re just showing up to the party? As Kaliya was at pains to point out in her talk at the Web 2.0 Expo:

Trust is not an algorithm.

It’s important to realise that there’s a big difference between trust and authority. Trust is a personal judgement, different for everyone. Authority is a top-down value. There may well be an algorithm for authority—based on past achievements—but on the Web, authority isn’t nearly as important as trust.

Richard’s musings were prompted by an article in The Times that falls victim to the usual trap of mistaking a lack of authority with a lack of merit, citing the usual examples of Wikipedia and political blogs. The argument is based on the idea that someone who is paid to write (encyclopedias, newspapers, whatever) is likely to be more authoritative—and therefore trustworthy—than someone who writes merely because they have a passion for the subject. In my experience, the opposite is true.

Take some recent articles in The Independent:

• Wi-Fi: Children at risk from ‘electronic smog’
• Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb?

These articles were written by journalists and so they have authority. Yet they are entirely without merit because the stories are sloppily-researched, hastily written and downright untrue. Authority, in this case, does not equate to merit. I am far more likely to trust a blog post by Ian Betteridge debunking the articles precisely because he wasn’t paid to write it.

The word “amateur” has come to mean “unprofessional and sloppy” in common parlance. But it wasn’t always that way. The word can also be used to refer to someone who does something out of passion and enthusiasm.

The problem with those articles in The Independent is not that they are amateurish: the problem is that they are professional.