My previous work with web development, including with React and Next.js, was not exhaustive, but it was enough for me to realize that what these frameworks are usually used to build is not what I think the internet should be. These “interactive web applications” that have been popular as of late have detracted from what the internet was originally intended to be: a codified protocol to share information and documents between computers.¹ These “interactive web applications”, with their bells and whistles, fancy animations, scroll-hijacking, chatbots, and 3d effects, are a huge waste of effort and generate nowhere near as much economic value as much effort is poured into it. So, I want to build a framework that brings the internet back to what it was originally intended to be - a framework that focuses less on interactivity, and more on simply communicating information.

I want to see people write. The internet for its existence thus far has been a catalyst for niche ideologies and groups to form and then spread into the mainstream (looksmaxxing, peating, microplastics awareness, to quickly name a few). (If I want people to write more, it might more worth my efforts to make a syntactical tool to make ideas expressed as concisely as grammatically possible without losing any information… And perhaps a suite to determine if something is “worth reading” or not according to some arbitrary criterion… to prevent pollution of the internet with AI-generated slop). I believe there are so many good ideas, ideas across disciplines, formed by people’s unique experiences, in people’s minds that would impact the world if they got out. So I create this framework with the intent for intelligent people to write new ideas, push stagnant ideas forward, and push them into the world. At time of publishing, there are rapid and amazing technological innovations happening in many fields right now, while the world at the same time is tending towards general instability², so pushing ideas about what course to chart for humanity is especially important. I made this program so people can focus on writing their ideas instead of website management. This framework ought to be easy enough to use so that there is almost no learning curve and using it is not time consuming, but should require very basic computer literacy so that not literally anybody (twitter) can publish anything.

In the spirit of a blogging framework, I will intro the design choices behind Sculblog in a stream-of-thought prose piece.

Previously I was part of a clothing startup, and it strongly influenced my design preferences. In a sentence: designing clothing strengthened a propensity towards minimalism in my preferences in the way everything not necessary had to be taken away to convey a core end-goal design to accentuate the most important things on the limited space on the human body.

A year later I got into computers and started writing software. And during my software writing journey, I stumbled across so many connections between clothing design and software design. You might thing the usage of the word “design” for both fields is merely an accident, but no, they were largely in the same domain! Not merely overlapping in semantic ways, in “oh I overlap these words from this field with these words from that field…,” but in activating the same brain circuits before I even realized it was happening.

The Sculblog project started when I was making a personal website compiling lots of my previous work including software projects, prose pieces I had written, and visual design pieces. It all started growing in complexity rather quickly, and keeping consistency between multiple HTML files was next to impossible, so it made sense to me to take a bit of time to make a simple framework. PHP and SQLite was the combination that worked best. After the website went up, I found out that there was no website framework that was minimalistic, customizable, and easy-to-use, so, with a little bit more development, I created one! In keeping with my tendencies towards minimalism, I wrote Sculblog to render down to pure HTML. Sculblog is the only blogging framework that renders down to pure HTML while preserving layout consistency across pages.

There is great beauty in pure information. That’s what computers do, they process information. Take our messy, imperfect world and turn it into an easily replicatable and preservable format. Tim Berners Lee… Aaron Swartz… So many of the greatest minds have put their work in pure HTML, a very pure syntactic format for sharing textual information. Aesthetically, pure HTML calls back to the old internet, when computers and the internet were being pioneered by madmen like John Perry Barlow. These visionaries made computers do the preservation, processing, and transferring of information, and I want to call back to that.

This is the ethos behind the Sculblog project.