Alex Chan is a former digital preservation engineer at the Wellcome Collection, and that pedigree shows in this quietly excellent post. The premise is deceptively simple: when you have a small personal collection of things — scanned letters, family photos, recipe clippings, concert tickets, a stash of zines — what's the right container for it? Most people reach for a folder on disk, a Notion database, or a third-party service like Airtable. Chan argues for something stranger and more durable: a tiny static website.

The argument lands because Chan isn't selling a product or a framework. The post likely walks through the workflow of pairing a flat folder of files with a small script that generates HTML index pages — essentially treating your filesystem as the database and the browser as the viewer. The benefits compound quickly:

• Longevity. HTML from 1995 still renders. A Notion export from 2022 might not import cleanly into anything in 2030.
• Inspectability. Files stay as files. You can grep them, back them up with rsync, open them in any tool.
• Zero infrastructure. No server, no database migrations, no monthly bill. Just open index.html.
• Browser ergonomics. Search, hyperlinks, image galleries, video playback — all free, all standard, all already on every device you own.

A technical audience should care about this for two reasons. First, it's an antidote to the gravitational pull of SaaS for problems that don't need SaaS. Engineers reflexively reach for tools that are dramatically over-scaled for personal archival work, and then watch those tools shut down, change pricing, or quietly enshittify. Second, it reframes the static site generator as something more interesting than "a way to publish a blog." It becomes a general-purpose pattern for turning structured data into a browseable interface — useful for documentation, internal dashboards, runbooks, anything where you have a directory of stuff and want to look at it.

There's also a craft-y pleasure to this approach that gets lost when you outsource your tools. Building a tiny archive site for your grandparents' photo collection is the kind of weekend project that teaches you more about HTML, CSS, and your own data than a year of using someone else's app.