Journal tags: manual

I’ve been going buildless—or as Brad crudely puts it, raw-dogging websites on a few projects recently. Not just obviously simple things like Clearleft’s Browser Support page, but sites like:

• The Clearleft podcast
• Patterns Day
• UX London

They also have 0 dependencies.

Like Max says:

Funnily enough, many build tools advertise their superior “Developer Experience” (DX). For my money, there’s no better DX than shipping code straight to the browser and not having to worry about some cryptic node_modules error in between.

Making websites without a build step is a gift to your future self. When you open that project six months or a year or two years later, there’ll be no faffing about with npm updates, installs, or vulnerabilities.

Need to edit the CSS? You edit the CSS. Need to change the markup? You change the markup.

It’s remarkably freeing. It’s also very, very performant.

If you’re thinking that your next project couldn’t possibly be made without a build step, let me tell you about a phrase I first heard in the indie web community: “Manual ‘till it hurts”. It’s basically a two-step process:

1. Start doing what you need to do by hand.
2. When that becomes unworkable, introduce some kind of automation.

It’s remarkable how often you never reach step two.

I’m not saying premature optimisation is the root of all evil. I’m just saying it’s premature.

Start simple. Get more complex if and when you need to.

You might never need to.

I wrote a thing. I wrote it for The Manual, Andy’s rather lovely tertial dead-tree publication.

The thing I wrote is punnily titled As We May Link (and if you get the reference to what I’m punning on, I think you’re going to like it). It’s quite different to most of the other articles I’ve written. My usual medium is hypertext, but I knew that The Manual was going to be published by pressing solutions of pigments onto thinly-sliced pieces of vegetation.

There’s a lot of fetishisation around that particular means of production, often involving the emotional benefit of consuming the final product in the bathtub, something I’ve never understood—surely water is as unsuitable an environment for paper-based analogue systems as it is for silicon-based digital devices?

In any case, I wanted to highlight the bound—in both senses of the word—nature of The Manual’s medium. So I wrote about hypertext …but without being able to use any hyperlinks; an exercise in dancing about architecture, as whoever the hell it was so eloquently put it.

I’m pleased with how it turned out, though I suspect that’s entirely down to Carolyn’s editing skills combined with a lovely illustration by Rob Bailey.

If you’d like to read what I wrote (and what Tiffani wrote and what Ethan wrote and what all the other contributors wrote), then you can order The Manual online …but you’ll have to wait until it is delivered to you over a network of roads and other meatspace transportation routes. The latency is terrible, but the bandwidth is excellent: when you finally have the book in your hands, you’ll find that it contains an astonishing number of atoms.

That’s assuming there’s no packet loss.