Everything is a web page

Prolific bloggers and webpage-makers often have a tendency toward thinking about their content in very specific ways. This is a static web page, but that is a blog post. One is like a piece of furniture, and the other might be more like a magazine. One is something you’d only ever see in a web browser, and the other will show up in someone’s feed reader. Two different things, right?

They don’t have to be! It’s just a mental model. A classic construct for how we think about organizing and classifying our web content. But on the World Wide Web, all of our content is a web page. We might point to one page and call it a static inventory of our favorite books, and we might point to another page and call it a blog post about our favorite books, and these might even have totally different URL structures, but at the end of the day they’re both Content-type: text/html. They’re web pages.

I think the greatest differentiator between these kinds of pages is whether or not we want to syndicate them in feeds. Our websites have pages that don’t get syndicated (what we think of as “static” pages) and things that do (what we think of as “blog posts”). But... why? Why not just syndicate everything? If you have an “About” page and you change it, why wouldn’t you want to add that to your feed and let your readers know about the update? If you make a nice new static page, why should you have to announce it and link to it in a separate blog post when having that page appear in your feed does the job for you?

As some folks know, I’ve been working on Neato for several months now, and it’s getting really close to being ready. As a publishing system, Neato is very much a blank slate. You can set things up exactly the way you want them and go to town. But I think once I have my own website and blog up and running in Neato, I’m going to try embracing the blurry lines between static web page and blog post, and lean into the idea that it’s all web pages and entries in a feed. And I’m going to syndicate all of my pages, because why not?! It won’t be nearly as chaotic as you might think: because of Neato’s flexible and modular nature, it’ll be easy to make it so that pages can be selectively marked for syndication (or not, and to choose and change related defaults at will), to add metadata for feeds that contextualize static pages, and to do any number of other things that tie the world of static pages and blog posts together in a neat bundle of web content.

I’m excited about the change. My next post (my next page!) will probably be more about this, and will be written and published in Neato itself. See you then!