Writober 2026 : Relic

I think one of the things I struggle the most with, in the modern Internet, is the relic of the past that are static websites.

See, I have very low object permanence: out of sight, out of mind. For blogs, news media, and so on, the solution is very simple: a solid RSS reader. But on static resources, which are often super valuable (probably more than most blogs on some accounts, sorry fellow bloggers), I don’t have this. I have bookmarks, which I basically never open. I have the Resources page on my own website, which I don’t think I’ve ever visited for anything other than adding soon-to-be-forgotten entries to the list.

I’ve thought many times about blogging as a mediocre approach to the internet. There are so many posts that I’m proud of, and that are lost to time because they’re old and being old has automatically disqualified them, as they don’t show up anywhere anymore. I guess I should add some of my best writings to my homepage. But again, do people actually visit the homepage? I know I don’t − I read RSS feeds (or rather, I have an RSS feed reader that renders an iframe of the blog entry I’m reading, so that I still benefit from the original layout… but I also read most longer articles on my ereader as a very plain epub).

I’ve considered building a digital garden. But then, how would we know when something is grossly out of date? I’ve considered following a relatively common practice of having a blog post index by theme, but ended up never actually doing the work behind that, of course. This keeps taking more and more space in my mind: in an era where we’re all about creating more content everywhere and where AI slop is drowning us, having one solid, useful page for one use case feels more precious than ever.

I don’t know if static websites are doomed to become a relic of the past for me, something that I know exists, that I sincerely believe might be the best approach to the web, but that I just cannot remember to visit. Maybe there is a solution. Maybe my Resources page could be my browser’s homepage. Maybe I, myself, could build more single-use subdomains on my website rather than always use the blog post format. I don’t know.