05/24 Minimal Monthly β€” Blogging Like It's 1999


May 2024

Minimal Monthly

Hi Reader,

If your favourite home & garden bloggers have been quieter lately, it's because they're deep in the trenches of social media, trying to figure out how to recoup the 70-90% loss in website traffic they're suffering. And it's not just home & garden that's been hit.

Now that Google prefers to serve content from Forbes and Reddit (or just display utter nonsense), web publishers large and small are in the doghouse.

Adding insult to injury, everyone's content was scraped and is being used in the new "AI overview" at the top of search results. Without attribution.

This is digital minimalism gone very, very bad.

I had a hand-coded blog back in the late nineties, before the word "blog" was coined. With the exception of three blokes in Vienna who likely just fancied me, no one read it because you couldn't find it on the web. In that sense, it's starting to feel like 1999 again (minus Hans, Fritz and Michi). Full circle, huh?

Both the consumer and publisher sides are complaining. Why not just do the obvious instead though? Either stop using Google or force it to serve classic results again with one of these simple hacks. Ah, bliss.

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Stuff I've Loved

  • ​Dollar Street is amazing. They visited 264 families in 50 countries and took 30,000 photos of their homes. Everything is sorted by income, and you can even filter for specific household topics like pets, toilets, stoves and much more. A humbling, eye-opening site.
  • I thought I was a browser tab hoarder, but this software engineer had 7,470 tabs open on Firefox FOR TWO YEARS πŸ˜…
  • WSJ presents the case for driving your car 'til the wheels fall off. Or if you live in a city, you can just sell it like I did last year.πŸšΆπŸ»β€β™€οΈ
  • ​The face of inflation: 9 quid for 2 ice creams, bloody hell, guy's gonna get nowhere with that, and he only does cards! We need to make this kid our spokesperson to the WEF.
  • This OP doesn't need new door ideas, they need a general inspection of that death trap πŸ™€
  • I met a developer in the digital minimalism subreddit recently who's been working on a super minimalist blogging platform at lmno.lol. It works with markdown, it's free, there are no ads, no trackers, no paywalls. If you've been itching to write on the web anonymously like it's the 90s again, or if you just like the idea of having an entire blog in one file, give it a spin. I've been using it for a side project and like how lightweight it is.

Thank you for reading. If you have any comments or feedback, hit reply and drop me a line.

Have a great month ahead,


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