I think I made a mistake.

Despite this being a busy spring and whatnot, the anxiety I’ve felt about blogging has largely evaporated: I’ve built myself a platform I enjoy using. But with the brouhaha about Facebook’s Instant Articles, it sure seems like a lot has changed very quickly.

Before, I’d mentioned that I had reservations about Meteor and those have born fruit. Much was squawked from on high with regards to the Future of Journalism™ when Instant Articles launched, but I’ve been much more interested in the meta-narrative about the web itself. Peter-Paul Koch and John Gruber brought me to the following:

  1. Instant Articles aren’t just a control play by Facebook—they’re a reaction to god-awful-slow sites.
  2. How’d the web get this slow? Developers are lazy.

Which is a long way of saying that I think I made the wrong bet. Now, don’t get me wrong—this is anything but an indictment of Meteor. I still love it. I’m still going to use it for data, work projects, and authoring here. But for an admittedly low-rent blog, it’s overkill. Fully-featured web apps have have a time and a place, but the web doesn’t need to pretend to be a native app. It should do what it’s best at: being the web.

So, I’m putting myself on blast and making some changes. Honestly not sure what to do yet. Meteor was a great ass-backwards introduction to Node, and all the modern programming features being added in ES6 are mighty tempting. But it’ll probably be something rendered on the server and sent as plain-jane HTML, with plenty of room for accessibility, performance, and whatever else comes to mind.

It won’t be perfect.

But it’ll the web.