The variety of formats which OER resources are available in (.epub, .pdf, .html, and other formats, including future formats like audio and potentially video (.mp3, .mp4) are a form of accessibility.

Is anyone placing OER materials into online channels which center piracy as a means of advertising or distribution?

(Library Genesis, SciHub, Pirate Bay, et. al.)

Why didn't university libraries take on the role of publishing and maintaining academic journals rather than ceding the function to major for-profit corporations which they now pay heavily to license that material back from?

In the Fight Over Ebooks, It’s Publishers vs. Librarians by Dan Cohen

https://sellhelp.valorebooks.com/article/44-grading-guidelines

Typewriters, Stencils, and Carbon Copies by Tim Covell

https://on.substack.com/p/how-to-sell-a-book-on-substack

Book pages should be printed in the direction of the paper's grain. This does three things: improves the durability of the binding, allows the book to lie completely flat, and keeps the binding from crackling when opened.

Agreed, still this was true before generative AI too. There's a qualitative impact to be expected from this quantitative shift [[Kwantiteit leidt tot kwaliteit 20201211155505]], and it may well be the further/complete erosion of scientific publishing in its current form. Which likely isn't bad, as it is way past its original purpose already: making dissemination cheaper so other scientists can build on it. Dissemination has no marginal costs attached anymore since digitisation. Needs a new trusted human system for sharing publications though, where peer network precedes submission of things to a pool of K.

https://www.pdfdrive.com/

Muriel Cooper, the first design director of the MIT Press and a founding faculty member of MIT's Media Lab, designed the MIT Press colophon in 1965. The iconic colophon has been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 2023.

The commission had originally been offered to Paul Rand (o Eye Bee M logo fame) in 1962, but when he turned down the offer, he suggested they offer it to Cooper.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5438280716

Manny's description of writing introductory language books using ChatGPT.

https://www.bookwhisperer.ink/

Well, they're not supposed to be ephemeral. They're supposed to be as durable as the title of whatever book you're talking about.

This is an interesting suggestion. But it would just keep publishers in the economic loop, not truly solve the engagement crisis they will likely face.

That seems somewhat comically optimistic. Misinformation has spread rampantly online without the accelerant of AI.

Powerful phrase

Richards, Olly. Interview with Michel Thomas Publisher Sue Hart, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjrsATBc5A.

Thomas had a secretive nature and did most communication either over phone or in person. He didn't write letters. Sue Hart felt that it was the result of his experience in World War II. (Potentially relationship with spycraft?)

He was a bit of a showman and enjoyed dropping names. He enjoyed his fame and status. Thomas seemed to enjoy people listening to him and didn't appreciate confrontation and dealt with it by shutting people off and walking away.

Nothing deep here about his method really. All just background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjrsATBc5A

German academic publishing in Niklas Luhmann's day was dramatically different from the late 20th/early 21st centuries. There was no peer-review and as a result Luhmann didn't have the level of gatekeeping that academics face today which only served to help increase his academic journal publication record. (28:30)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_J._Chisholm

Hugh J. Chisholm,

https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/

Reminder: is there a GitHub project that has LaTeX layouts like these?

https://github.com/LPBeaulieu/Notebook-Maker-PrintANotebook/blob/main/README.md

This makes me want to create RoundPegRoundHole. But then I'm not sure whether this should be in h. or tw. I would lean towards a public tw which has the feeling of TV Tropes in that it's a database of patterns. Perhaps that's the use case of publishing a subset of a tw/Zettelkasten.

The other (meta) thought this generated was how the decision of whether to be public or private interrupts the pleasant flow that comes from knowing exactly where to put a note and how to divide a thought. This is what experience tiddlywiki fluency is trying to capture.

Paratext can be more important than the text itself as it's used to frame or encourage the ultimate work. Paratext can be an inviting lobby that welcomes the guest in or scares them away.

https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-is-no-longer-allowing-downloading-kindle-unlimited-titles-via-usb

Amazon is no longer allowing downloading Kindle Unlimited titles via USB<br /> January 14, 2023

https://www.benji.dog/articles/sparkles/

Bendat, Julius S. Principles and Applications of Random Noise Theory. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1958.

My copy of this book from 1958 has a table of contents with numberings for chapter, section, and subsections.

Eg: 1.2-1 Constant Parameter Linear Systems

https://standardebooks.org/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>awarm.space</span> in Making a modern ebook with Standard Ebooks (<time class='dt-published'>08/02/2021 12:08:19</time>)</cite></small>

from Niklas Luhmann, Niklas Luhmann Short Cuts (English Translation), 2002, 22.

This just means that they're measuring productivity incorrectly. If they worked out productivity per work hour, they'd likely find the drop in productivity was much less, if present at all.

https://www.iamabook.online/

https://medium.com/@ben_fry/tracing-the-origin-65011dc20877

Could be interesting to apply this sort of process to a variety of texts over time. A draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to mind.

How to view this through the lens of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? particularly as this was the evolution of an idea by the same author over time...

https://fathom.info/frankenfont/

fascinating, particularly for a typography nerd...

Found via https://benfry.com/traces/

https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed

Some interesting history of notebooks in America.

@1:10:20

With HTML you have, broadly speaking, an experience and you have content and CSS and a browser and a server and it all comes together at a particular moment in time, and the end user sitting at a desktop or holding their phone they get to see something. That includes dynamic content, or an ad was served, or whatever it is—it's an experience. PDF on the otherhand is a record. It persists, and I can share it with you. I can deliver it to you [...]

NB: I agree with the distinction being made here, but I disagree that the former description is inherent to HTML. It's not inherent to anything, really, so much as it is emergent—the result of people acting as if they're dealing in live systems when they shouldn't.

Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]

When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/63774/original-dates-of-publication

To include the original date of publication in a reference from within Zotero, add the following to the 'Extra field':

original-date: YYYY

Dwyer, Edward J. “File Card Efficiency.” Journal of Reading 26, no. 2 (1982): 171–171.

Ease of use in writing and grading with short assignments by using 4 x 6" index cards in classrooms.

This sounds like some of the articles from 1912 and 1917 about efficiency of card indexes for teaching.

I'm reminded of some programmed learning texts that were card-based (or really strip-based since they were published in book form) in the 1960s and 1970s. Thse books had small strips with lessons or questions on the front with the answers on the reverse. One would read in strips through the book from front to back and then start the book all over again on page one on the second row of strips and so on.

Art and markets intersect in the form of patronage

Even when it is "self-patronage" of an "artist with a second job."

Not mentioned in any other sources I've consulted (yet), Goutor recommends adding notes about the physical location of bibliographic sources to bibliographic notes. This should include details about not only the library and even call numbers, to minimize needing to look them up again in the future, but to have notes about arrangements and contacts which may needed to revisit harder to access resources. (p14) This can also be useful for sources like maps which may be needed for higher quality reproduction in the final text. (p15)

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/28/publisher-blocks-access-ebooks-students-faculty-scramble

I still say that students should do their own work on researching and identifying textbooks and not their professors. They should all be optional and never required. This would fix the textbook issue rapidly.

I agree with many that the black and red are overwhelming on many and make the book a bit less approachable. Warm tones and rich wooden boxes would be more welcome. The 8.5x11" filing cabinets just won't fly. I did like some with the drawer frames/pulls, but put a more generic idea in the frame (perhaps "Ideas"?). From the batch so far, some of my favorites are #64 TopHills, #21 & #22 BigPoints, #13, 14 D'Estudio. Unless that pull quote is from Luhmann or maybe Eco or someone internationally famous, save it for the rear cover or maybe one of the inside flaps. There's an interesting and approachable stock photo I've been sitting on that might work for your cover: Brain and ZK via https://www.theispot.com/stock/webb. Should be reasonably licensable and doesn't have a heavy history of use on the web or elsewhere.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=math+for+dummies&i=stripbooks&crid=89N2XQ5IZTX1&sprefix=math+for+dummies%2Cstripbooks%2C117&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=math+demystified&i=stripbooks&crid=UM15P2ZTY84C&sprefix=math+demystified%2Cstripbooks%2C137&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

A whole series of books from McGraw Hill whose titles all carry an implicit math shaming. Who wants to carry these books around and be seen reading them? Even the word DeMYSTiFieD on the cover is written in CLoWn case.

• Business Math Demystified
• Dosage Calculations and Basic Math for Nurses Demystified
• Geometry Demystified
• Business Calculus Demystified
• Math Word Problems Demystified
• Everyday Math Demystified
• Discrete Mathematics Demystified
• Math Proofs Demystified
• Pre-Algebra Demystified

Automatic reference cards!

When did they stop doing this!!!

https://lithub.com/what-five-years-with-a-predatory-vanity-press-taught-me-about-art-and-success/

https://lithub.com/what-working-at-a-used-bookstore-taught-me-about-literary-rejection/

The razor thin margins argument only works from the bookseller's perspective, and this is primarily due to excessive competition from Amazon. Beyond this, sure the product would be slightly more expensive, but (pun intended) only marginally so. Revenue margins on classics written before 1924 (which most of this class of books is) are also significantly higher because they're public domain and the company isn't paying royalties on them. Additionally, at scale, a company with a series like Penguin Classics has a pretty solid understanding of print runs and demand to more easily allow them to innovate like this. Take the Penguin Classics copy of Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War which lists for $20 in paperback and sells for $12.00 on Amazon. (You'll notice that Amazon is essentially giving away their entire discount (aka margin, usually a 40% discount on the list price) here. At a 10,000 copy print run, the cost of the print/paper/print run is in the $2.00 per copy range or lower. Amazon is taking a razor margin for the sale, but Penguin is pocketing almost $10 in pure profit as I'm sure their marketing budget is very near zero here.<br /> They could easily still do very close to this with either larger book margins or even the same text printed on 6 x 9" instead of 5 x 8.25 (or even smaller pulp sizes) so they don't have to reset the entire book for pennies on the dollar at the publisher level. Given that the majority of this market is targeted at students, who could directly use these affordances (and often do but in more cramped space) for the small mark up (particularly in comparison to the $80 copies, which still don't fit the bill, when they exist), I would attribute their non-existence to laziness and lack of imagination on the part of the publishers. Perhaps a smaller publishers like Dover might take on such a project as a means of cheaply, but profitably improving their position in the market? Those making the argument for not marking up these sorts of copies to keep the book pristine for the next reader are missing the point. I also suspect that they haven't recently purchased these sorts of used copies that often go for under $4 on the used market. Even when treated well and not heavily annotated by the first reader, these books are not in good shape and really aren't designed to be read by more than three people. It's also the reason that most libraries don't purchase them. I might buy their argument for the more expensive hardcover collector's market, but not for the pulp mass market books which hold almost no value on the secondary market. Additionally the secondary market for this class of books doesn't usually reflect large value differences between heavily annotated/highlighted texts and those that aren't. Whether they mark them up or not, the first owner is responsible for the largest proportion of depreciated value. Tangentially, I find myself lamenting the cultural practices of prior generations who valued sharing annotated copies of texts with friends and lovers as tokens of their friendship and love. I'm guessing those who vitiate against annotation have never known these practices existed.

a publisher that takes having wider margins seriously!

This is what we want to see!! The publishing company Annotate Books is republishing classic texts with a roomier 1.8" ruled margin on every page to make it easier to annotate texts.

It reminds me about the idea of having print-on-demand interleaved books. Why not have print-on-demand books which have wider than usual margins either with or without lines/grids/dots for easier note taking and marginalia?

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/C5WcYFhsEeyLyFeV9leIzw

https://quarto.org/

Academic research used in Wikipedia articles drives more citations

It's worth introspecting on why any given person might hesitate to feel that they can commit. This is almost always comes down to "maintainability"—websites are, like many computer-based endeavors, thought of as projects that have to be maintained. This is a failure of the native Web formats to appreciably make inroads as a viable alternative to traditional document formats like PDF and Word's .doc/.docx (or even the ODF black sheep). Many people involved with Web tech have difficulty themselves conceptualizing Web documents in these terms, which is unfortunate.

If you can be confident that you can, today, bang out something in LibreOffice, optionally export to PDF, and then dump the result at a stable URL, then you should feel similarly confident about HTML. Too many people have mental guardrails preventing them from grappling with the relevant tech in this way.

Dear god I really hate when publishers do their references/notes like this. Sitting here at the end, unlinked to the actual text. There's a special place in hell for editors that do this in the digital age.

u/sscheper in writing your book, have you thought about the following alternative publishing idea which I'm transcribing from a random though I put on a card this morning?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a traditional linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index at the end so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it?

It could be done roughly like Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone or Henry Korn's Pontoon Manifesto? Perhaps numbered consecutively to make it easier to bring back into that format, but also done with your zk numbering so that people could order it and use it that way too? This way you get the book as well as a meta artifact of what the book is about as an example of how to do such a thing for yourself. Maybe even make a contest for a better ordering for the book than the one you published it in ?

Link to: - https://hyp.is/6IBzkPfeEeyo9Suq-ZmCKg/www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/

Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ

How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?

What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/

I don't know if this is true for anyone. It certainly seems like most people who are digital natives (or immigrants) rarely make the connection and end up missing out on some lessons from print that would actually be helpful.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/judith-jones-dead.html

As an editorial assistant at Doubleday in Paris, Judith Jones rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejects in 1950. She proceeded to persuade a superior to publish the diary in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_book

Found looking for information about the tradition of birthday books.

Do your colleagues who read your work, annotate it, and comment on it not count as peer-review?

Am I wasting my time by annotating all of this? :) (I don't think so...)

Does "what they need" here implicitly mean "a design that no one really benefits from but you can bill a client for $40+/hr for"? Because that's how Glitch comes off to me—more vocational (and even less academic) than a bootcamp without the structure.

What was that part about home-cooked meals?

This is where I think Glitch goes wrong. Why such a focus on apps (and esp. pushing the same practices and overcomplicated architecture as people on GitHub trying to emulate the trendiest devops shovelware)?

"Web" is a red herring here. Make the Web more accessible for app creation, sure, but what about making it more accessible (and therefore simpler) for sharing simple stuff (like documents comprising the written word), too? Glitch doesn't do well at this at all. It feels less like a place for the uninitiated and more like a place for the cool kids who are already slinging/pushing Modern Best Practices hang out—not unlike societal elites who feign to tether themself to the mast of helping the downtrodden but really use the whole charade as machine for converting attention into prestige and personal wealth. Their prices, for example, reflect that. Where's the "give us, like 20 bucks a year and we'll give you better alternative to emailing Microsoft Office documents around (that isn't Google Sheets)" plan?

Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.

Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.

I'm sure I read this ages ago, but it's not in my notebook yet. Perhaps worth another pass for notes.

Published on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection published for the first time from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.

Was it truly created as a "diary" from the start? Or was it just a portion of his regular note taking collection excerpted and called a diary after-the-fact? There is nothing resembling a "traditional" diary in many portions of the collection, but rather a collection of notes relating to the passing of his mother. Was the moniker "diary" added as a promotional or sales tool?

https://read.bookcreator.com/

A digital book creation platform geared toward elementary students and teachers.

https://read.bookcreator.com/mvPgY7WlzpZ0iB6KWCYbUdmFdOo2/csMtTr4PTQCk-jfc8U6ygQ

A Digital Librarian's Survival Toolkit

In an ever-increasing sphere of digital print, why can't publishers provide readers a digitally programmed selection of footnote references in texts?

This digital version of Annie Murphy Paul's book has endnotes with links from the endnotes back to the original pages, but the opposite links from the reading don't go to the endnotes in an obvious way.

I'd love to be able to turn on/off a variety of footnote options so that I can see them on the pages they appear, as pop up modals, or browse through them in the end notes after-the-fact as I choose. This would allow me to have more choice and selection from a text based on what I want to get out of it rather than relying on a publisher to make that choice for me.

Often in publishing a text written for the broad public will "hide" the footnotes at the end of the text in unintuitive ways where as more scholarly presses will place them closer to their appearance within the text. Given the digital nature of texts, it should be possible to allow the reader to choose where these items appear to suit their reading styles.

Chawla, D. S. (2021). Hundreds of ‘predatory’ journals indexed on leading scholarly database. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00239-0

This appeal would have a greater effect if it weren't itself published in a format that exhibits so much of what was less desirable of the pre-modern Web—fixed layouts that show no concern for how I'm viewing this page and causes horizontal scrollbars, overly stylized MySpace-ish presentation, and a general imposition of the author's preferences and affinity for kitsch above all else—all things that we don't want.

I say this as someone who is not a fan of the trends in the modern Web. Responsive layouts and legible typography are not casualties of the modern Web, however. Rather, they exhibit the best parts of its maturation. If we can move the Web out of adolescence and get rid of the troublesome aspects, we'd be doing pretty good.

Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.

Link to the idea behind Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers which had a different conceit, but a similar publishing form.

Based on this definition of a "note", one must wonder if my public notes here on Hypothes.is are then not notes as they are tacitly circulated publicly from the first use. However they are still specifically and distinctly preparatory towards some future finished work, I just haven't yet decided which ultimate work in which they'll appear.

Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

This same sort of quote is often repeated in the present while vitiating against the corporate publishers who own most of research publishing and charge for it dearly.

Print runs of the earliest books by publishers may have been around 300 copies going up to 1,000 copies during the sixteenth century. Compare this to 10,000 copies today to reach "best seller" status.

There's way too much excuse-making in this post.

They're books. If there's any defensible* reason for making the technical decision to go with "inert" media, then a bunch of books has to be it.

* Even this framing is wrong. There's a clear and obvious impedance mismatch between the Web platform as designed and the junk that people squirt down the tubes at people. If there's anyone who should be coming up with excuses to justify what they're doing, that burden should rest upon the people perverting the vision of the Web and treating it unlike the way it's supposed to be used—not folks like acabal and amitp who are doing the right thing...

https://readlists.jim-nielsen.com/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jim Nielsen</span> in (Re)Introducing Readlists (<time class='dt-published'>03/25/2022 23:09:14</time>)</cite></small>

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/reintroducing-readlists/

Web serendipity has struck again. I was just looking for a tool that would do this very thing and so missed Readlists as a service.

Fun to see Jeremy Keith's book featured here.

https://every.to/letter

A manifesto about what the Every platform is all about. They're trying to create a new(?) economic model for writers working together.

I'm not really sure how this is dramatically different from prior efforts or if the economic incentives are actually properly aligned here. Many writers without critically looking at the whole may be led here as much by marketing hype as anything else. It almost sounds like they're recreating The Huffington Post, but giving away some of the value up front instead of leaving all the value in one person's hand for a future sale.

Who owns the copyright of the created works? Are editors and proofreaders just work for hire here? What about their interests?

Social media has to some extent democratized the access to media, however there are not nearly enough processes for creating negative feedback to dampen ideas which shouldn't or wouldn't have gained footholds in a mass society.

We need more friction in some portions of the social media space to prevent the dissemination of un-useful, negative, and destructive ideas swamping out the positive ones. The accelerative force of algorithmic feeds for the most extreme ideas in particular is one of the most caustic ideas of the last quarter of a century.

This is an interesting perspective, but are there cases where it's false?

Link to the idea at CAA that you haven't really read a script unless you've actively acted upon what you've read.

A substantial subset of the personal homepage contingency associated with blogging advocacy "movement" doesn't understand this.

https://bookmarks.reviews/

This would be a useful plugin for freely publishing Obsidian content via Git, except for this problem. I depend on whitespace in filenames. Pity.

But maybe you don't need to do that. Maybe it would be instructive to take lessons from the traditional (pre-digital) publishing industry and consider how things like "print runs" and "reissues" factored in.

If you write a blog post in 2017 and the page is acceptable*, and then five years later you're publishing a new post today in 2022 under new design norms and trying to retrofit that design onto your content from 2017, then that sounds a lot like a reprint. If that makes sense and you want to go ahead and do that, then fair enough, but perhaps first consider whether it does make sense. Again, that's what you're doing—every time you go for a visual refresh, it's akin to doing a new run for your entire corpus. In the print industry (even the glossy ones where striking a chord visually was and is something considered to merit a lot of attention), publishers didn't run around snapping up old copies and replacing them with new ones. "The Web is different", you might say, but is it? Perhaps the friction experienced here—involved with the purported need to pick up a static site generator and set your content consistently with templates—is actually the result of fighting against the natural state of even the digital medium?

* ... and if you wrote a blog post in 2017 and the page is not acceptable now in 2022, maybe it's worth considering whether it was ever really acceptable—and whether the design decisions you're making in 2022 will prove to be similarly unacceptable in time (and whether you should just figure out the thing where that wouldn't be the case, and instead start doing that immediately).

Kimberly Prather, Ph.D. (2022, January 11). This paper is not published..not reviewed...and has serious problems that will hopefully be fixed during the review process. The lead authors know this. See posts by me @linseymarr @jljcolorado . [Tweet]. @kprather88. https://twitter.com/kprather88/status/1481019341625724928

This is a common enough feeling (not about Publii, specifically; just the general concern for flexibility and control in static site generators), but when you pull back and think in terms of normalcy and import, it's another example of how most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people.

Almost no one submitting a paper for an assignment or to a conference cares about styling the way that the users of static site generators (or other web content publishing pipelines) do. Almost no one sending an email worries about that sort of thing, either. (The people sending emails who do care a lot about it are usually doing email campaigns, and not normal people carrying out normal correspondence.) No one publishing a comment in the thread here—or a comment or post to Reddit—cares about these things like this, nor does anyone care as much when they're posting on Facebook.

Somehow, though, when it comes to personal Web sites, including blogs, it's MySpace all over again. Visual accoutrement gets pushed to the foreground, with emphasis on the form of expression itself, often with little relative care for the actual content (e.g. whether they're actually expressing anything interesting, or whether they're being held back from expressing something worthwhile by these meta-concerns that wouldn't even register if happening over a different medium).

When it comes to the Web, most instances of concern for the visual aesthetic of one's own work are distractions. It might even be prudent to consider those concerns to be a trap.

Yeah, but...

Keeping your website's look 'up to date' requires changes, but keeping your website up does not require "keeping its look 'up to date'".

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/us/cargo-ship-cookbooks-overboard.html

Book releases push when shipping containers go overboard.

There could be an interesting movie idea here...