The following are my raw and unedited thoughts spread over a number of weeks. I add these to the page as I think them through, usually while walking my dogs. once I get to the point where I have shared all my feelings on the subject I will attempt to put some order into the chaos.
The internet used to be a huge place. Netizens filled their time writing email, visiting forums, making websites, chatting on IRC. They filled their bookmarks folder in their browsers with hundreds of places they enjoyed to visit across the web.
These days, the Internet is contained, reduced to a smaller number of places that people may visit every day. Boring.
It's time to take it back.
Why I have a homepage
I believe in taking back control, reclaiming my digital future and contribute to rebuilding a web for everybody.
I don't have a website for popularity or making money. I want to develop interesting things to write and share. I don't care if anyone reads it or not. I don't want to share on social media.
I miss the personal, do it yourself aspect of everyone having their own homepage rather than a page within a closed social media platform. The rise of these social media platforms have lead to an increasingly user-hostile web, and I don't like it.
Websites and blogs these days are no longer organically passionate. They're just looking at ways to capitalise on any given subject, and in doing so, creating an search optimised mess, dilluting the usefulness of the web!
The old web
It's hard for me to pin point when or where the old web finished for me. I want to say sometime around 2010...
To me, the old web was not an aesthetic, but a community, not just a single community, but hundreds of little communities.
Sure there were websites that we lovingly slapped together HTML with textured backgrounds and hard to read text and enough animated gifs to bring your internet connection to a grinding halt, but there were also a lot of beautiful websites, remember this was a time where we were starting to figure out what we could really do on this web thing.
To me, the old web was all about having your own place on the web, lovingly crafting your homepage and tending to it over time, filling it with whatever we felt was interesting.
The old description of a whole genre of E/N websites in the old communities resonate with me to this day. My website means everything to me and nothing to you.
We hyperlinked far and wide, to our favourite sites or new sites we came across that we thought were cool or interesting. We linked to each other. We didn't need a search engine to tell us what we might need to visit.
We posted useful information, information that got straight to the point. We didn't post recipes or guides with a 1000 word story on how a loaf of freshly baked bread straight out of the oven reminded us of spending summers at our grandparents farm. Fuck that, haha.
We were not confined to the walls of giant tech companies hostile silos of the Internet.
The personal web
When I think of the web my first thoughts are of the personal web, and I smile.
The personal web is where everybody owns their own corner of cyber space where they can share what ever they want, how ever they want.
The personal web is not dictated by an algorithm, nor is it designed to sell you something.
However it may be designed to influence you in enjoying reading about something that brings joy to another netizen.
The medium of choice on the personal web is the personal homepage. With our own homepages we are free to choose the layout, design, graphics, fonts and colours of our homepages. They allow us to show off our personal style to each other and the rest of the web.
We decide what goes where and don't care if it's beautiful or a beautiful mess.
The simple web
Do you remember when you went to search the web for something, and you would often come across personal homepages, dedicated to a single topic, full of high quality information, created by people who absolutely loved the topic?
These days web search results are full of low quality seo'd pages full of adverts, that are not related to what you were searching for at all. All the old high quality info sites are either non existent, lost to search algorithms as they've not been updated in a number of years, do not support https, or the valuable information is stuffed in between a useless 23 minute video!
I can't stand the videos either. they're usually long drawn out introductions, irrelevant stories about absolutely nothing, don't forget to check out our sponsor, who also sponsors every other video creator, and then if you're lucky, a couple words about the topic you were after that could have easily been communicated on a simple page of text marked up in good old HTML. The videos are drawn out and created to be a certain length so that they can be monetised...
Don't forget to like and subscribe!
The commercial web
The web today, social media is easy and people are lazy, or they don't know what more the web can offer them.
for the most part, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all make it very easy to share what's on peoples minds quickly with no setup or configuration on the users end, outside of writing a brief bio.
Which is fine. However, I don't see a too big of a difference between that and sharing the same stuff on your own personal home page, where you get to own your own content, except that the setup experience requires a few more steps than mindlessly entering every single piece of personal information.
Not everything has to be monetised, hobbies can be that, hobbies. Making and sharing something doesn't need affiliate links, sponsored posts or targeted ads.
RSS exists to follow those that you are interested in. however, again the setup experience rules out a lot of people who are either unaware, lazy, or don't care, and want things handed to them (what's my privacy worth for the convenience?).
Now, shitposts, hateposts aside, there is so much awesome content lost amongst the crap on the above platforms. Some examples are super awesome bbq tutorials stuck inside a Facebook group, or super awesome info posts lost forever in someones Instagram stories. Outside these platforms they're undiscoverable! Even within the platforms they're undiscoverable as unless you saw the content the day it was posted, otherwise it’s mostly lost forever in a stream of endless crap.
Similar vein with blogs where the chronological post order came into play. It signified that anything dated old was no irrelevant.
Our own homepages where we share our content that is dated for various reasons isn't a big deal due to the way we are able to organise, curate and bring attention to particular pages.
I think the discoverability aspect of the web was lost during the time where blogs became means of monetisation and people no longer linked each other or other blogs of similar topics as they were now the competition, competing for page views for the measly cents per view that Adsense provides.
I loved linking all my web friends homepages from my own back in the day, that formed a sense of community within the communities for what ever topic your page was about that particular month. With version 2 of fLaMEdFury I’ve brought this back.
Web3
Is it all doom and gloom? Is it really the new web? Is web3 finally the internet for the people by the people without monetisation as their main driver?
Or is web33 a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist when you think about it?
Decentralisation has always existed, and still exists in one form or another. Think of community focused forums powered by phpBB or vBulletin.
Do we need web3 to prove that we own our content on the blockchain? I have made this point many times on this very page.
Owning your own content has always been fairly easy on the web3 with a bit of effort.
Final thought
Having a personal homepage is awesome, if you don't have one, get one!
I’ve curated a set of resources to help everyone to get started, no matter your skill set:
Building your own homepage
| Jackie's guide to making a website zine | Want to make your own website, but don't know how to start? Jackie's awesome Zine is a 28-page, Risograph-printed comic guide to help you brainstorm, design, and bring a personal website to life. |
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Learn the basiscs of web design in 4 minutes. A step-by-step interactive tutorial that explains how to use basic CSS styling to make a nice looking homepage. | |
MDN Web Docs is a popular document repository and learning resource for web developers. This site provides learning resources for open web technologies like HTML and CSS. | |
Responsive web design is the practice of designing functioning websites that look good on different devices, screen sizes, orientations and resolutions. This freeCodeCamp course will take you through the basics of how to use CSS to make your homepages look good, no matter what device that they're viewed on. | |
Interneting Is Hard | Interneting Is Hard provides a comprehensive set of web development tutorials to help take you from beginner to pro. Topics covered include HTML/CSS basics, Flexbox, responsive images, typography and the importance of semantic HTML. |
Hosting your homepage
| Neocities | Neocities is a commercial web hosting service for static pages. It offers 1 GB of storage space for free sites and no server-side scripting for both paid and free subscriptions, the service's expressed goal is to revive the support of free web hosting of the now-defunct GeoCities. Many new and old webmasters come to Neocities to host their new homepages. |
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Netlify offers hosting and serverless backend services for web applications and static websites. Netlify is optimised for websites whose source files are stored in the Git source control system and generated into static content files. They also offer a drag and drop functionality for websites that have already been statically generated. |
Around the Web
Collections of links to others who think the same.
Community Manifestos
A selection of my favourite manifestos written .
| The Web 1.1 Movement | Bytemoth dives into the value of creating your website by hand without waste. I'm not going full Web 1.1 myself as I absolutely love my graphical expression but I love the points made. Contains a great list of links. |
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Sadgrls initial dreamwidth post from 2020 inspired this very page. Since then she has expanded her thoughts like many of us and is now the most popular manifesto out there. | |
Melon clearly understands what he stands for and what he wants from his homepage. | |
I really vibe with Cyote's seperation of homepages and nostalgia and firm view of creating modern and accessible homepages. I believe you can create the asthetic of 20 years ago with modern tooling, I hope that my homepage is an example of this. | |
Auzzie Jay says goodbye to the corporate web, click through to his manifesto and links to other great manifestos. | |
I'm still working my way through everyone else's manifestos, and I will add them as I do. In the meantime, the Yesterweb provides a nice index of the wider community manifestos. Enjoy. |
Read more about the personal, small, and open web
Have a read through the archives of my bookmark folders and Pocket reading list. There are a number of absolute gems in here of others who share similar thoughts.
| Ten Commandments of the Small Internet | A grassroots internet movement called "the small Internet" is afoot. Here are ten commandments that cheapskates would like to see largely obeyed on the small Internet. |
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"I miss the internet of the early 1990's." | |
Web 1.0 design nostalgia. Like all nostalgia, it's bullshit. | |
Here are some things Cheapskates learned about the Internet by creating their own website. | |
there are at least seven reasons you should have a personal website. | |
In big cultural concepts like music or fashion, things have a way of coming around full circle. | |
"Ever since I visited my first web site (via a slow modem to a library BBS running a text-based web browser), I have been ceaselessly pondering the nature of the web." | |
If it doesn't appear in Google's search results, does it really exist? | |
A dozen years ago, the web started to reshape itself around major companies like google. We can understand the genesis of today's algorithmic arms race against the tech titans just by looking at a single character. | |
the question is: at which point do we reach the breaking point? | |
there is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it's called the indieweb. build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms. | |
"i prefer websites that are built with simple html, minimal css, and no javascript for read-only web experiences." | |
The personal website is a somewhat mysterious animal that lives mostly unobserved in the jungle of the Internet | |
until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the internet is beyond the control of governments. how naive the conventional wisdom sometimes is. | |
"this is more of a rant i guess. hackernews provides a text box, that's close enough for me." | |
The Rise And Fall Of Grunge Typography by Sharan Shetty. Hop on the nostalgia train for a second. Think back to the 90s. To Nirvana, Linklater's Slacker, and the flannel-clad rebels on the run from the 80s. To skateboards... | |
The World Wide Web Foundation began as a way to bring the web to everyone. In these trying times, it is needed more than ever. | |
In the late 90s, an obscure site called Superbad pioneered jarringly bizarre, often ugly, but occasionally beautiful web design. It's taken all this time for the rest of the internet to catch up. | |
In an interview for her book Internet Art in 2004, writer Rachel Greene had this to say about why she felt... | |
We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves... | |
Zany, early creative communities like DeviantArt and conceptart.org have been steamrolled by homogenous social media platforms. | |
Why tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017. | |
Information floods the internet. You can't control it, but it must be controlled for you to absorb it. It is primarily controlled through infinite feeds of content on social media... | |
Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data. He has technology and a start-up pursuing that goal. Can he succeed? | |
Blockstack's system would let you control your own personal data—for example, by revoking a site's access to it... | |
How to make 2021 the year of the independent web.... | |
People talk about growing communities and growing brands, but does anyone talk about growing a website? | |
There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home... | |
So I can write code inside my spreadsheet, but not inside my browser? WTF! | |
I was always a worrier, but I used to be a young worrier. Now I am not so young. I still find things to worry about. I find myself more and more concerned about my future as a developer. | |
Is it just me or does nobody have their own website anymore? OK, some people do. But a lot of these sites are outdated, or just a list of links to profiles on big tech platforms. Despite being people who build websites, who love to share on the web, we don't share much on our own sites. | |
People who grew up with the internet of the 1990s probably remember forums — those clunky, lo-fi spaces where people came together to argue about cars, cycling, video games, cooking, or a million other topics. They had their problems, but in retrospect the internet of those days felt like a magical land of possibility, not a place for organizing pogroms. | |
In the days before the web was mainstream, it was a place of creation. First for education, then for every random idea that any creator had! As the web transitioned from a network of educational institutions to the consumer force it is today, the early adopters were technologists... AKA geeks! | |
The internet brings the world into people's homes, enabling people to interact with worldwide events in a way that television can't. What's changed? | |
The old blogosphere is being eaten alive by the rise of social media and the mobile web. | |
I started using the internet when I was seven years old. In 2021, it's not too shocking to imagine a seven year old with unrestricted access to the internet. In 1999, though… different story, different internet... | |
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flannel shirt. Back when you could really say you were surfing the net... | |
Measure, analyze, check your stats, take a look at the insights. Whether you are running a business website, a personal blog, a Twitter account or a Facebook page, there is someone breathing down your neck asking about the numbers... | |
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest... | |
The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless... | |
Quick: Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos? How about something you've written? Maybe some old sent emails in Gmail or old Gchats? | |
What began as cheerful anarchy was devoured by vulture capital and ruthless consolidation | |
a perfect rant into the pitfalls of the web today, alongside some suggestions for their way forward | |
OP comes to the realisation that the Internet has become boring and commercialised. Sparks an interesting conversation. | |
Believe it or not, the internet used to feel a lot cozier. In the early days of the World Wide Web, as many of us called it back then, going online was like exploring the Wild West... | |
The free web hosting service GeoCities was founded by Beverly Hills Internet in July 1995, which exactly corresponds with the moment that the web left academia and started to become accessible to everyone. Users began learning Hyper Text Markup Language, and welcomed each other onto their “home pages” — the first personal websites. | |
Geocities is likely a site you've heard of. It may even have been a site that you used. It's origin, and the movement it later inspired, is an incredible story of self-expression and serendipity. | |
A few people have already used Web 0.5 by back-construction from Web 2.0. Sean Coates used it derogatively of MySpace, but this O'Reilly blog post is more positive, suggesting Web 2.0 is a return to earlier Internet applications. | |
The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today. | |
How the historic company became known as a bumbling villain of internet culture | |
How do we memorialize life online when it's constantly disappearing? | |
wikiHow embodies an alternative history of the internet, and an interesting possibility for its future. | |
Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren't run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be again. | |
The problem with the old internet isn't that we treat it like the good old days of digital utopia; it's that we don't have enough detail about it to properly understand it with the depth and nuance it deserves. | |
Page no longer live, points to archive link. Dezzie asks herself, what makes us creative. What gets us to build a website? What the hell is a website today? Not the web community, or tech industry. She means humankind... | |
Max explores the current state of a monetised data gathering web and makes a call to action to make things for the sake of it and make them free! | |
Pretty much a TLDR version of everything I've typed above and it all comes down to - Always. Own. Your platform! |
First published Apr 6, 2021
Public Service Announcement 2000
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