why website

14-07-26

This is a while overdue. I've wanted to actively maintain a website for about five years now, but a concerted push from governments around the globe to lock down the free and open internet prompted me to really move this one up the priority list.

Platforms can’t be relied on. My many (many) issues with Twitter aside; it facilitated hundreds of thousands of my messages to friends and hosted just as many of my younger self’s idle thoughts. After the rebrand and ensuing ban wave and emigration, most of that was lost.

For years, Silicon Valley has sought to make the web an actively hostile experience; a place of addiction, surveillance, predatory monetization, harassment and mainstream agreeability. Every forum has been consolidated, every mode of expression mediated. The platforms are incentivized to protect their own interests, and their shareholders mandate that your interests are undercut further and further with every passing financial quarter.

For these reasons, you should make your own website. It might seem antiquated, but this isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s an effort to transform my mode of interaction with the internet into something slower, more thoughtful, and more personal.

credits and resources

This site was made using Izzy Kestrel’s ‘bimbo+’, the paid version of a static site generator similar to Marina Kittaka’s Zonelets. I also recommend checking out tomotama’s Kiki or Kate Bagenzo's Strawberry Starter for lightweight blogs.

This site is coded in VSCodium and hosted on Neocities, and I frequently used W3Schools’ HTML and CSS guides. I used a hit counter from Donald Zou, and a site background from Betty's Graphics.