Greater Than the Oceans
Yesterday I wrote a bit about the opportunity to learn and adapt as the world continues to embrace AI tools. I've been experimenting with these technologies for about a year, but only in the last few months have I begun applying them in earnest to projects. This has led to a cascade of discovery — the more I build, the more I realise how much more there is to learn. To say this has been humbling would be an understatement. At times, my ignorance feels greater than the oceans.
This might be par for the course. We rarely grasp how much we don't know until we start digging.
One area that has surprised me most is the ever-expanding set of expectations for website metadata. Optimising a site has always been the maintainer's responsibility, but the amount of structured markup now expected — both in HTML and in things like XML sitemaps — has grown dramatically. What's more, support for multiple languages, once a virtue, now seems to confuse modern search engines more than it helps. That’s a problem for some of the multilingual web properties I’ve built and maintained, but it also presents an opportunity: a chance to revisit Midori CMS, the publishing platform I’ve been evolving since 2010.
Midori’s last major rewrite was in 2017, resulting in Version 5, which still powers 10Centuries and its related sites. A newer Version 6 powers smaller projects like Tiinii. But as I study how the web has changed — not just technically, but philosophically — the idea of a consolidated Version 7 is taking shape. This version would prioritise content sovereignty, giving authors more control over how (and whether) their work is indexed, parsed, or repurposed by search engines, AI agents, or even other humans.
Whether I can realistically build this new version in the short term remains to be seen. But even if the code must wait, the knowledge I’m absorbing each day is already reshaping how I approach the web — and that’s no small thing. "Absorbing" really is the right word. Despite the monotony of recent years at a day job that lacked challenge, my brain still seems flexible enough to soak in unfamiliar ideas like a sponge.
Whoever said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks clearly wasn’t trying hard enough.