See, the rabbit doesn’t lose because he gets tired. He loses because he gets confused about which direction to go. Did you notice how it stops in the middle and stares blankly as everyone around it yells loudly about things it doesn’t understand? That’s me on Twitter.
As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits. Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance. Spaces without nuance tend to gravitate towards stupidity. And as an American, I can tell you, there are no limits to the amount of damage that can be inflicted by that dangerous cocktail of fast-moving-stupid.
There's so much reason and value in Frank's post that resonates on deeply with me. I coded my first webpage around the same time as him - 20 years ago - using HTML. Geocities and Angelfire. If I need to try something today, I'll still use old-school HTML with tables. CSS, that surfaced a couple of years later offered so many new opportunities I became the rabbit. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
When I redesigned my website and moved away from Wordpress, I had this idea that without a database and a CMS, things would be simpler. I don't require much, just text and images, static pages and a blog feed. But with Jekyll, I had to learn Github. I had to learn how to 'build' in the Terminal. And I had to learn Markdown.