Something was said not too long ago about how everything on the web is becoming the same. Blogs are great, but dear god, look at the templates and how it's hard to differentiate one from the next. The formats for outputting your personal thoughts is generic, and it has lent itself to a boring web. (However, being someone who has designed and developed for the web for many moons now, I certainly understand why templates are a good thing and how they make it easy to follow web standards. And yes, web standards are indeed a good thing.)
I had a thought process on the way to work this morning about templates, and how templates make things easier. For everything. Bear with me here.
Take a chaotic life, for example. If you take that, place a "Normal Life" template on top of it and then squeeze in the bits and pieces of that life here and there to follow specified formats, you've got a good idea of how things are going to look and feel. And if you take your relationship, and take a "Normal Relationship" template on that, defining how this or that will look or operate, then you end up with a pretty good idea of how things should work out. Same goes for raising children, having friends, etc. If we all just had things templatized, it would be so much easier, right?
Well, that's where my thought process hung for a second, because I realized that while templates are great for the masses, they certainly do lend themselves to output that is expected and ultimately, boring.
That's right, BORING. It's like coloring inside the lines because that's what you're supposed to do.
For awhile I lost my zeal to blog because, to be quite honest, it became boring. What differentiated me from anyone else? Nothing that I could think of, at least not after I worked through a lot of the internal struggles I had going on when I first started journaling for the world to see. That was back in 1997, back when it was a new thing to do and not everyone was doing it. It served as a great form of expression then (as it does now), but what made it better then was that it was different. We didn't have templates and there was really no concept of what this should be like or how it should be done. You designed your own pages for the most part, sometimes to the point where it looked great to you and like total ass to everyone else, but dear god - YOU DESIGNED IT.
I agree that templates are fabulous and necessary. I, too, have fallen prey to taking the easy way out and templatizing my site. I'm just now learning enough about CSS that I can see where I can have the templates but can start straying away from the "boring" into more personal designs that serve as another form of self-expression that, to me, are more interesting.
And that, my friends, is exactly what the web needs. More of that infusion of intrinsic design and creativity. I'm not saying it's not out there, but blogging has certainly silenced that aspect of the web a bit, wouldn't you say?
