After seeing the result of some little changes, thanks google, I’m starting to think that it might not be so great, and I’m thinking a hard reversion might be in order. If you think about it, what was everyone doing before social media anyway?

Recent changes are now adding a Sitemap, and an RSS feed to the mix, along with OG-images to boot. The next step would have been to make a way to enter your domain name information so that it would become functional… but wait, why are we trying to align this with the norms required for social media integration anyways? Isn’t that what this project is the antithesis of? Wasn’t that the design direction from the outset?

Don’t get me wrong, you could always easily strap that on afterwards, or we could make it an option but, my feeling is to leave the defaults as just a minimal HTML drafting program. Just output the minimum of formatting and let the user decide the rest. Don’t make them do work to remove what they never wanted/needed.

If ‘discoverability’ is what you are after:

You can still get that yourself, there is no loss here.

I really just liked it better before, and if you wanted an SSG(static site generator) you should just go ahead with setting it up, it has all of those thing handled automatically.

But this program is supposed to be the artistic/fun program.

If everything is going to change (possibly for the better), maybe this program should be on the right side of it, and almost completely ignore the presence of social media. That means we don’t need metadata as the default. For a lot of users, I can see this as being a good choice, and a broad preference. Metadata, sitemaps, and RSS feed are really only for people who want Google to read and index their pages.

If you don’t care about SEO or Indexing, then who cares?

If you are drawing your website for yourself or your own friends, then you don’t need any of that fancy metadata. You can just send the website link to your friends, and that’s how it can work. I feel pretty strongly about this, and unless you are in the business of advertising deliberately, and you want attention from ’the internet-at-large’(strangers), you really don’t want metadata/etc anyhow.

Wish us the best for reverting the changes and taking metadata out of the equation for now.