TECH: Deer Text Format - the system powering this site, and how it can work for you - the DeerZone

in tech, politics, webdev, capitalism, social media, enshittification, leftism, frontend development, php, website, css, technology

my personal website runs on a bespoke dynamic site generator i coded from scratch. but why? what lead me to designing and programming it? what can you do with it? and how can it be transformed into a tool for everyone to use? a deep dive into Deer Text Format, why it exists, and what lies in its future.

i've been a computer user all my life; i've spent more time of my life behind a screen than not. i have been connected to the internet since at least 2006. you could argue that my parents giving me access to a computer with an internet connection at such an age wasn't very wise, but it did mean i have been familiar with social media and digital creation from a very young age. i practically grew up on web 2.0, IRC chats, Hamachi, and phpBB boards. social media platforms were also a part of that; i've been on places like YouTube, Hyves, Twitter, and Facebook since their early days, back when these types of websites were still an exception to the norm.

because at one point, the web was just... user-generated. nowadays, we are so caught up in "the web" or "the cloud" being this nebulous framework for all the tools in our daily life to run on. everything is a web app now. everything that isn't a web app gets consolidated into an app at some point. everything is a piece of software hijacking and perverting what were once just languages for creating simple documents, pages, and layouts. HTML wasn't meant to exist on a fridge!! those phpBB forums aren't a thing anymore; that's a subreddit now. those fan websites ran by individuals became too expensive and too undiscoverable, so they're on Fandom now. we live in an age of venture capitalism, where all these apps fight to become a main, centralized provider of whatever service it is that they provide. everyone is on Twitter! and the problem with that is that any megalomaniac billionaire can gain access to Twitter and run it into the ground. we are encouraged at every step to centralize our content with these businesses that become too big to fail... and then they fail... and we're left to deal with the wreckage of that. millions of profiles and writings turn into lost media because we trusted these massive platforms with our data, and they ended up breaking that trust.

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