What? Website? Why?
I have a kind of mantra I live by, and I repeat it again and again every time I start a new project:
"I really hope this works. I really hope this works."
It can be hard to finish larger-scale projects, especially without any outside influences. I don't know how intrinsically motivated people operate. They scare me. Of course, you kind of have to do hard things or you'll never get better... at doing them... Look, I'm sure you've heard enough motivational speeches about comfort zones to identify a TEDx speaker at fifty paces. I'll skip the boring parts about personal growth and crippling fear of stagnation and instead talk about why make specifically a website? There's a few interesting reasons:
- Knowing how to program is never a bad thing, especially nowadays where even college programming classes are teaching people to "vibe code" with AI instead of actually developing problem-solving skills (Fire Dr. Bennings).
- It's an opportunity to talk about me, my favorite thing to do! ...Also, it serves as a nice portfolio of my work if I can clean up well enough.
- There's an ongoing movement of people nostalgic for the early days of the internet. Having your own website was once a fairly common thing to do, and it does seem fun!
Getting Started
I opted to use Neocities because it's a free host. It's working well so far, but I do have a backup plan if need be - retrofit a Raspberry Pi I'm not using into a really weak server and just leave it plugged in and turned on forever. But Neocities works so I guess I can save myself the effort.
When I first started planning out the site, I struggled to come up with content to include. Nothing I could think to do seemed like it would be worth anybody else's time to read. The worst-case anxious part of me decided (and I have not been able to convince her otherwise) that people would be annoyed if I made them look at my website. Jokes about loving to talk about myself aside, what was I going to write?
My objective with the site right now, I think, is to just write about or share anything I've got going on that people might find entertaining or helpful, and if I take up space on my website that I made myself, maybe that'll be okay, actually.
HTML, my beloved
If you've never tried programming in HTML, I strongly encourage giving it a shot at least once.
It's shockingly intuitive, and you can get results really quickly. Is it the most versatile language in the world? No, it's really just for the making websites thing. But boy, can you make those websites. The main structure of the site came together so quickly, that there's honestly very little to say. Most of the visual appearance is determined by a single file, the style sheet, that controls everything from the font, to the colors, even to where the main text and the sidebar get placed.
the style sheet isn't technically html, though. it's a css file, but i'm willing to overlook it.
From there, it all gets pretty easy. Clicking links? It's just opening a different file. Images? Same thing. All websites are just fancy file explorers. You can just keep adding and adding until you have something you're happy with.
You can just keep adding files.
The only limit is the bandwidth of the mortals who look upon your site.
Yet they would not understand. Not even with a 100 Mbps download speed could they grasp the nature of your custom site.
You could turn your website into a Maze...
...Huh? I must have spaced out for a minute there.
Things are getting contrived, let's stop here
So, there's a little insight into making this website. Future blogposts will more likely be focused on the creative process and the fun that I'm having building this thing and having it actually work! OK bye