So this one day, I was going through my RSS feeds as usual. I came across an article describing Nekoweb, which I can proudly call home for this part of me that needed this.
Hours later of clicking through links, more links and more links, I ended up in different personal spaces, reading personal thoughts, seeing (im)perfect creations. I want to start of to say, I'm proud of every single one of you. Even for the mostly empty pages, just for taking the step of claiming a personal space online, write a little HTML/CSS and call it yours. I came to a realisation, I found my people once again, a new world. I found a place to call home once again <3
With over 22 years of coding experience, it's sometimes hard to realise how HTML/CSS looks to someone completely new to it. How it is to write your first tags and be amazed what is being produced on the screen, and back then I judged too, like many of you as well. Now I feel kind of a regret for this, since I took it all for granted. I dabbled in social media, but in this day and age we have arrived in a world I never imagined possible. Everything moved there, everything looks the same. Mostly everything is part of the truth, or even just lies. I remember Twitter being launched, I created an account, shared some random thoughts and things, it was nice. I was doing what I was meant to be doing according to the vision they laid out.. But then shortly after it got picked up by more, and suddenly everyone was there. And it got bad, really bad.. Until where we are today. I used to have Facebook, some other social networks years ago.. Until the point came I was done with it, and took everything away. I still hate social media for what it has become, more asocial media. I came from a time, where there was no Google, no Facebook, no Instagram, there was just freedom. The internet was mostly unregulated and everything went, and you went exploring from website to website.. Now you get stuck in your search bubble or even in your social media bubble. There was Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod etc. People were making their own space on the web, it worked. We had fansites, we had webrings, we had blogs with unfiltered personal thoughts.. including mine. I remember downloading a single MP3 file which took about 30minutes on my telephone line, same with the SNES roms.. But the 30mins downloading gave me hours of fun playing the actual game, so it was good. I feel a strong nostalgia back to those times. I went through archive.org more than once the past years, finding back my old websites, reading up a few blogs of people I knew back then. Some I'm still in touch with and we can reminisce together which is nice.. But it's not the same. At some I came across this video, unfortunately found it only on Facebook but it's called "The early internet is breaking - here’s how the 90s web will be saved". And YES, this was it. Thankfully there are multiple projects, including restorativland.org that tries to bring it back. And there is the one terabyte of Geocities dump which this project is digging through for treausre.
So I decided to move in here, to satisfy this part of me longing for the way things used to be.. So I wanted to start, about to set up a new static site with my now current favorite JS framework Astro, looking at CI stuff to get my website published on Nekoweb and then I suddenly realised, NO! This is NOT the way. You want to go back to back then, and so it will be, back to writing HTML/CSS by hand, no generators, no frameworks. Just everything crafted by hand.. so here I am, back to writing HTML/CSS by hand and probably keeping everything up by hand.
And with this, comes a small disclaimer.. This will be a space for me, I truly hope you enjoy visiting my humble abode, but if for any reason it doesn't work on whatever device you are using.. Just try something else. I don't develop websites for a living anymore for a reason, and the main reason is all the bullshit we have to take into account nowadays, SEO, responsive design, using the latest and greatest JS/CSS frameworks etc. It was already a nightmare back in the day with Internet Explorer, haven't we learned?? So no, I will built this with the tools my 17 year old self had too.. Plain old HTML/CSS, maybe a sprinkle of Javascript and some Photoshop magic. If it works on my machine, I'm good.
This is for me, and you are free to leave any time ;) and if you want to read a little more history, check the first entry of my journal.