Marcel Winatschek

The Case for Small Software

Scott, who runs the English design studio Toggle, was looking for German translators for Pixie—a free, stripped-down CMS that runs without a database, fits on a USB stick, and makes no apologies for being small. The anti-WordPress. The thing you install in five minutes and then just use.

There’s something quietly radical about that in 2008, when the direction of the web is clearly toward platforms that grow larger and more dependent with every update. Pixie was the other impulse made concrete: own your thing, run it yourself, don’t feed it into a machine bigger than you. Whether it found its German audience, I don’t know. But the idea behind it still feels right.