When the new builds on the old

[claudeb]

I've been aware of the Kicks Condor blog for a few months, ever since they linked to one of mine in the spring of 2019. Didn't pay much attention to it however until I started noticing mentions from other bloggers I read. And then, of course, there were the continuing referrals.

Kicks Condor is a blog about the web, but not the bloated monster most of it has become; rather, it's about all those small, quirky, personal websites that thrive in the cracks between corporate giants. The liminal spaces where people increasingly find themselves and each other again. Sure enough, it is one of them, too: built in the spirit of old Geocities, the layout takes a little bit of effort to figure out. Like a cat, it chooses you... if you prove worthy. And of course it's incredibly light beneath all the fluff.

Somehow, it does all that while being thoroughly modern as well, with support for webmentions, microformats and OpenGraph. (Speaking of which: dear web designers, make sure your sites have the kind of metadata people use in the 21st century; conversely, dear app developers, do yourselves a favor and fall back on the good old title and meta description elements when nothing better is available.) There are also all the usual goodies that minimal blogs often do away with nowadays, to their detriment. Such as a good old-fashioned blogroll.

Content-wise, it turns out there's method behind the madness: the dizzying design in fact follows a tumblelog format, with links, quotations and longer posts flowing freely. Where else can you read about Wikipedia on the Dat network, TiddlyWiki experiencing a revival and small personal web directories, all in the very first screenful of text? Scroll down, and you can also find out about someone who decided to ditch apps and craft a blog by hand, out of HTML. I'm not alone!

A site that makes you think, then, and fall in love again with an internet made by people, for people. Together. Gently.