destructured

I have two new posts up at my personal site, both in the Ways folder. I point them out here mostly because they’re somewhat illustrative of what I think a Ways folder can do.

Let’s take a step back, though. What, in the first place, is a Ways folder? The idea came about mostly because of the positive reaction to an assertion I made from my Merveilles account:

Putting information that you’ve found useful on a simple web page with no ads, no scripts, no ulterior motives—this is a valuable online service.

In saying so, I was consciously tapping into an ethic that posits personal websites as a means of cultivating a healthier type of sociality online, one meant to carve out a congenial spaces outside the widespread commercialization of the web. That ethic already has wide currency on the fediverse, so it’s not terribly surprising that people were receptive.

I started mulling over how the practice might be codified as a convention of web design. (About pages, now pages, blogrolls—people who build personal websites love a good convention.) The answer seemed straightforward enough: Create a directory, fill it with pages. Yet, as further discussion demonstrated, there are nuances to how you might approach it.

For example: Several people suggested calling it “How” rather than “Ways.” That might seem like a difference without a distinction, reducible to sheer preference.¹ There are associations I wanted to preserve, though, and others I wanted to avoid, and “Ways” fit those imperatives better.

For one thing, I wanted some contrast against the “how-to” genre, which is largely commercial and bound up in SEO. Those associations make “How” feel, to me, a bit presumptuous, as though the page were claiming objectivity or authority. Commercial sites vie to convince readers (or, at least, search engines) that their “how-to” is definitive—or, at least, no worse than what you’d get from a competing site. “Ways” is meant to embrace pluralism: not “this is how to do x,” but “this is the way that works for me.”

That’s what I was striving for with “The way I make moka pot coffee.” I hope that other people will find those instructions useful, but they’re not meant to be definitive. They’re very much just the way I do things, based on a little advice and a lot of practice.² Because they’re not meant to be definitive, I don’t have to hedge by listing all the different things you can add to coffee. I specify adding a little oatmilk because that’s the way I have my coffee.

Ways folder should be opinionated. They should be written from the point-of-view you bring to the practice—not just on details like the relative merits of coffee additives, but also on which ways a person ought to adopt, and why. You might look at “The way I’ve configured address bar suggestions in Firefox” and wonder why any topic as finicky as that would warrant a Ways page. At first glance, the page itself doesn’t really offer much justification—aren’t I just making things more difficult for myself? But the justification here is partly ideological, maybe even ethical: I’ve come to see the convenience of automatically searching from the address bar as enabling a number of bad tendencies, both on my part and on the evolution of the web. Reconfiguring Firefox is one way I’ve found to curb some of those tendencies. So there it goes, into the folder. Should you make it your own? Maybe; but whether or not you adopt the how is less important to me than that you think about the why.

Ultimately, I decided to stick with the name “Ways,” in part, because I associate it with the concept of folkways, the sociological term for the learned behavior that constitutes the mores and traditions of a community. I’d be perfectly happy to see people use their Ways folders to share actual folkways they’ve inherited, alongside the individual ways they’ve developed. The general vision is of a mode of self-expression grounded in the practicalities of a person’s lived experience. A Ways folder should be more than just an archive of instructions you’ve copied or paraphrased from somewhere else. Everything in it should be personal, experiential, practical. Each page should explain something you’ve made your own.