Redesigning and Relaunching the Perpetual Beta Website

Published on May 03, 2025

I can’t even remember what started it.

This site was decomposing, slowly at first, then rapidly. The software driving the site—WordPress, for something more than a decade—automatically updated past the non-automatic and largely ignored update demands of its dependencies. What version of PHP does it require? What version of MySQL? Some number far higher than was here.

The old blog posts, the old archives, aren’t here anymore. I’ve stashed them safely away in my personal backups but like the software publishing them, those writings also failed the test of time. I’ve upgraded myself but those old scribblings never followed me into the present.

And for the most part, I didn’t care. No one visited, no one read, no one commented. Blogs fell by the wayside as 120-character microblogging took off, and that’s where everyone’s attention, including mine, turned.

And then that turned sour. Even before all this (gestures broadly) writing online became a chore, and reading online just pissed me off. I took multiple “breaks” and eventually just stopped. And then when the billionaires finally squeezed every last drop of joy out of it all and enshittified every corner of the public square, I began to buy in to the idea of owning your own platform.

Like we did in the 90’s.

And now this place is coming around full circle. I turned the first digital shovel in November of 1999, hard-coding HTML in Windows Notepad and sending it upstream by FTP to my AOL-based web space. Crafting content in text editors, pushing static HTML files, came to seem so primitive when Blogger came out, then MovableType launched, then WordPress swallowed the world.

Now it’s back to hand-crafting text and pumping out static files.

And writing this down brings me back to why I started to care about this place. As I left one platform, then another, I wanted my friends to be able to find me. But even as my placeholder accounts gather dust, the only place I really trust anymore is here. You won’t find any power-mad spacemen or data brokers here. Hell, I don’t think I’ll even bother counting site visits, let alone tracking the search terms that bring the occasional visitor here.

Enjoy the freedom.

For now, I’m rolling things out slowly. Everything web has changed since the last time I cared to look. New layout and design techniques have changed this process so much, I’ll throw my back out if I try to lift too much at once.

I chose 11ty for its relative simplicity and text-file-friendliness. I’ve thrown out blogging in favor of a more digital garden based approach—more consistent with the idea of the Perpetual Beta anyway.

And in that same spirit of developing “in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis…” I’ll just put this out here and improve it as time goes on. Start simple, and progressively enhance.

Everything old is new again.