Zinzy

I am notorious for never grasping how many people know how much about what. To save myself from any further embarrassment I won’t spend my time here telling you what the app is about. The team does that nicely over here. I do think I have something to say about what Scriptogr.am came exactly at the right time for me.

As we more further down the line of Web 2.0 and slowly into the abyss that is Web 3.0, I feel the definitions of web design are evolving greatly. I remember back in the day when it was just one website out of fifty that looked really beautiful, and how I would spend many hours on the site just being surrounded by all the pretty. Now, as more and more distinct design trends are emerging, looking pretty isn’t the main goal anymore. It has become a criterium. And most websites I know meet that criterium in one way or another. Now that the eyes have what they need, the user wants for the website to be up to speed with their brain.

And this is where websites fail.

Not all websites have the potential of being minimalist, small and clean code-wise. Pardon me if I say that the designers might know ways to get there, but experience tells me clients always manage to come up with ways to make a code more extensive than it should be. So, some of the websites I am talking about can be exempt from my suggestion. But certainly, and most of all, I am talking about the weblog. A place where, once in 1992, a HTML page and new words every now and then would suffice. We have come a long way from that simple structure. Now, with everybody tuning into Wordpress, Drupal, and Tumblr for ready-made templates and every single widget known to man, I feel I’m becoming more and more detached from simple, beautiful web design and UI.

Scriptogr.am, to me, is a great answer. It gives me very few options: I can write, display some links, even add an image if I like, but that is as far as I am gonna go. There are no custom archives, last.fm user grids, Flickr photo streams or twenty PHP pages I can configure any way I want to. It is me, my words, a few nice web fonts, a few links, and the ease of writing from anywhere in a cloud. Scriptogr.am allows me to ask myself a question I was afraid to ask myself for a long time: why does my website need every available function? Why do blogs take up so much space?

This website is now as much a personal space as it is a manifest and an experiment. In the upcoming weeks or months I will experience what it is like to use one app that is always with me and directly upload content to my website without having to do much beside write. I truly believe that, as a blogger (whether you are a professional or an absolute amateur like me), it is crucial to know how much effort writing a blog should take. In my opinion, it should take very little. Not only because it is simply too much work, but also because I’ve learnt that keeping my blog beautiful and cool became more important than actually writing on it.

Let’s see how this goes.