The Webmaster Is Back: A Manifesto for Everyone
Webmaster a Manifesto for Everyone
In this manifesto, Brennan Day argues that the webmaster—the one-person web professional who builds, designs, and advocates for the web—is not dead, but waiting for a comeback. He traces the role from its 1993 origins to its decline in the age of specialization and social media, then dismantles the myths that keep people from creating their own sites. With just a computer, a text editor, and free hosting, anyone can become a sovereign creator. The web is not too complex, and you are not incapable. It's time to reclaim your digital autonomy.
Being a webmaster means becoming a sovereign creator. We are not reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' only to then offload the work and art onto chatbots. We are reclaiming it because it is the only title that remains which still carries the weight of total, unapologetic human agency over our digital lives.
- Gualdrapo
I was a webmaster for my uni (trying to handle the abhorrent monstrosities of Typo3) and some other unis around here (WordPress and Joomla), all of them while juggling with several other tasks (web development, graphic design, etc., etc.).
"Webmaster" being the person who adds, updates and deletes contents on a daily basis, and fixes misc, small issues with both frontend and backend. Or at least that's how that word has been used in those environments I've worked. My contracts listed that among web dev, graphic design and other tasks, one of them was doing webmaster duties.
With that in mind I feel like the author is extrapolating the concept quite a bit - one of the first quotes in the first part acknowledges that a "webmaster" is kind of a website administrator. Granted, in my case I learned some stuff "by force" because I had to deal with several stupid problems, and many of them that I caused by myself; but at no time I was supposed that my task was to make the website do something it was not supposed to do. It's rather a stressful job (believe it or not), as with pretty much anything web development related. But the point is that we as webmasters can't do much to do the truly thing that can save the current web, to reclaim it back from the greedy hands of the giant corpos.
- okzgn
Looking at the code and the website, you can tell it was hand-coded: the HTML, CSS, and even the JS (few people use DOMNode.style.display = 'none/block' these days, and I doubt an AI would suggest doing that). An impressive leading by example.
- sshine
Webmaster is also the alternate title of a 1998 Danish sci-fi.