how building a website is like letterpress printing
You know what letterpress printing is - some knowledge has filtered through the limestone into your brain over time. Gutenberg. Moveable type. Really expensive, deeply embossed wedding invitations.
You probably don't know a lot about it though, so here is seven minutes of a British man explaining it to you. Only seven minutes!
Using a 1500 lb machine and pieces of lead to print a poster is certainly not necessary. Setting up forms (whatever it is you're trying to make) takes hours. The machines are old - mine are from 1917 and 1956, and they break. They are heavy. So many spots to oil. If parts break, they need to be machined... by like the one man in Indiana that still does that.
We gather on forums to describe exactly where and how a certain squeak sounds. To seek out feedback because nobody in our day-to-day lives has any idea what we're doing. We do cool things that only other printers can appreciate. There are niche jokes. And mostly, we don't have to do this at all if what we're into is printing posters.
Like building personal websites in 2025. It's not for "a web presence" or discoverability or reach. It is the pursuit of craft, the ways to web out information and ideas that makes this idea persuasive. I saw this article from Zach Mandeville that clicked right away, because it's how I felt the first time I moved type around, and fifteen years later how I feel about re-learning HTML:
How does something become a folk tradition? Is it the age of the practice, or how many (or few) people practice it? Folk revivalists in the 60's were idolizing artists from the depression era, which happened just 30 years prior. The world wide web is nearly 30 years old, and the internet itself over 60. There are people leading internet companies today who are far younger than the web, who never knew a world without the internet. If a teen is drawn to early web aesthetics, it is not out of a nostalgia for their youth. It is, instead, a yearning for a time from before they even existed, a time they can only imagine. That seems hella old to me, and hella folksy.
Maybe we are looking for "obsolete" technologies and practices unencumbered by our present stage of capitalism, like back-to-the-land hippies in the 60's re-learning how to can organic vegetables after processed food companies began to rise. I can say there's a nostalgia for me as someone who put websites together on Geocities as a teenager, but nostalgia isn't enough to get me learning the things I am learning on my own now.
For webmastery and letterpress, the process is the art form. I struggle to get going on a blog post, but I can open a drawer of type I can pull out physical forms and sort them out until they make sense. My best ideas with my HTML and CSS come with the fucking around, not just rendering an idea. Troubleshooting is all I do.
I get in my text editor, make a few changes, hit publish and see what new problems I have created for myself. On the press, I move type or linocut blocks around, add ink, and test it - no more than 1-2 changes at a time. The troubleshooting is the fun part.
I have this unshakable urge to make letterpress-printed work about the web - the open web, the craft in hand-coding, the web revival movement, the need for us to build the internet we want, because venture capitalist is going to build a magically perfect ad-free platform for us.