In recent months I’ve been reducing my footprint on the major social media platforms. Privacy concerns, scammers using my family photos, and the overwhelming algorithmic decisions of what to shove in my face rather than showing me my social circle has made me completely uninterested.
That said, I still want a digital footprint, somewhere to share what I’m working on, without the chance of getting “shadow-banned” or kicked off, and I miss the internet of the early 2000s where everyone had a website via geocities, etc.
So for the first time in a very long time, I’m renting server space, relearning HTML (a lot has changed since html3) and CSS. Making just a little corner of the internet where I can post my own writing, art, and guides from things I’ve had to learn.
Besides just generally following EposVox and being interested in the ideas he brings forth to the table I sort of gravitated towards this forum because of my mild interest in old web revivalism, which got started with my foray into writing a personal website, so, suffice to say, I have one.
It’s hosted on a platform called Nekoweb, which, while very young especially relative to Neocities, is pretty chill and cool, and got me to learn about the whole community of personal websites out there. I have a lot of thoughts about the community overall, but from the general feel I can say it’s a really nice underground environment that has plenty of young people in it, like teenagers even. People lamenting the old web with all the old feature nostalgia are probably in for a culture shock with how much of it is here and probably better than ever.
Edit: realized I did not talk about what the site is for. It was originally intended to be a counterpart for my not-yet-active YouTube channel, but I got a bit sidetracked. Currently it’s more of my personal weblog but I want to curate videogames and other stuff at some point, as I feel like I can add something to that should I put effort into it.
Oh, that’s a cool alternative to Neocities. Personally I’ve not been in that realm since Geocities, but keep thinking about revisiting it.
Right now my personal website is very “Me” branded since I want a digital footprint that future collaborators and employers can google instead of Facebook or something, but I’ve always been toying with putting an alterego out there…just can’t seem to pull the trigger.
Edit: Realized I had another question to ask.
“People lamenting…is here and better than ever.” As a person truly missing the old web, how do you find those places these days? You don’t just search “nostalgic website” or “old web” on DDG or Google etc, and I really don’t feel like participating in new Tumblr or new Blogger, so I’m at a loss.
Right now I’m on mastodon and this website, and am self-hosting my own website.
I have had a personal website for about 15 years, but I put as little effort into it as possible. It runs WordPress on a shared hosting provider I found that supports Let’s Encrypt certificates for free. Decision paralysis is a big problem for me, so the theme is just one of the default themes from WordPress.
Honestly, I haven’t posted anything to the site in over a year. I had a really good run back in 2021-2022 with posting something once a month. It was a challenge to myself after attending an InfoSec security conference and sitting in one of the last presentations of the weekend titled “How to Give the Gift That Keeps on Giving - Your Knowledge”. But as with many things I started, motivation ran out. So, the site just sits there.
I’ll hear content creators say things like, “I’ve got a list of hundreds of ideas I want to do.” I feel the opposite. I have a hard time thinking of something to write about or create a video about. Some of that comes from not wanting to spend my non-working hours creating content. And some of it comes from creating scripts and solutions at work (IT infrastructure) but not being able to share them due to the risk of exposing too much internal information.
As a person truly missing the old web, how do you find those places these days? You don’t just search “nostalgic website” or “old web” on DDG or Google etc, and I really don’t feel like participating in new Tumblr or new Blogger, so I’m at a loss.
I just go on Neocities and browse whatever’s recent/active out there. Ppl put buttons on their sites as well as join webrings to network and stuff, so such an adventure is bound to lead somewhere interesting.
Also worth checking out is a Marginalia search engine, which is specifically tailored towards niche/oldweb websites that aren’t as easily indexable over the Google search due to SEO and such. Unashamedly niche and great for that.
I am posting rants and things that belong on a personal website in a couple of discord servers and… this forum. Hopefully I’m not being too much of a bother. I do like comments/replies, and I don’t know how that would be handled on a dedicated personal website.
I thought people use LinkedIn for that? Idk, I can’t think of anything I would want to show to an employer