why I wrote this website,
published 23 September 2024
So, around August of last year I started following The Odin Project with the goal of learning web design and eventually getting a job in the field. After learning the basics of HTML and CSS over the course of a couple weeks, I decided that career path was not for me, and since then I have begun studying Anthropology in college. For the most part, I put those aspirations behind me and set to focus on other passions of mine.
In June of this year, however, I made the switch to NixOS, a linux distribution that can be best summed up as “computing by code,” where configuration, installation, and management of packages is done through coding. Through this process, I learned much about Git, developed useful skills and habits for coding, and found a lot of enjoyment from the process. While I still am certain that this is not a field I would like to make a career out of, I have discovered a significant passion for it.
Cut to now, where I have written a website for my own personal blogging, a list of resources for various subjects and interests, and, well, anything else I may decide to use it for. So how did I end up here? Well, that’s the subject of this first blogpost. I will give you one spoiler: it was much easier than I thought it would be.
A few months ago, a friend of mine sent me a video titled Basic Guide To The Personal Web. In this video, the creator details several components and skills one may wish to learn and explore in order to escape the corporate-terraformed landscape of the Internet and return to a more free terrain. They outline important features of this “Personal Web” as RSS, Blogging, community-based messaging systems & webrings, and most importantly, personal websites.
Ultimately, this video crafted the image of a web based upon creation, community, and personalization. This appealed to me. I recall listening to a tech podcast (a guilty pleasure of mine) that described the current way through which the average person used the Internet as being through a set of 3-5 corporate-controlled websites at the most, with most people rarely going beyond that within a browser. After all, what do you need beyond YouTube, Amazon, G-Suite, and maybe Twitch? (Note that between those sites, just two corporations own them collectively). In comparison lied a vision of a personally crafted Internet—one truly “free as in freedom,” not “free as in paid-for-by-data.”
But this is all very abstract and frankly philosophical, so let’s get a bit more down to Earth.
When I was but a wee lass, I discovered the magic of Twitter; suddenly all my private thoughts could become public, my day could be journaled, my ideas and aspirations shared freely. All in the span of 140 characters. On Twitter, all writing is bite-sized. Of course we wrote threads when needed, not just individual tweets, but the message was to write short enough for someone absent-mindedly scrolling through their feed after school or work to be able to grasp without needing to exert too much attention.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think we should be breaking up the most important things to us into 140- (or 240-) character sized chunks. Do I think conciseness is important? Yes. But I want to be able to express the depth of my thoughts, not just briefly scratch the surface. (By the way, in case you’re curious, this post is, in total, about 9,650 characters—that would be a 41 tweet long thread today).
As I grew older, I moved my sharing to Discord, “infodumping” everything in a special channel my friends made for that exact purpose. Here, we could (and were encouraged to) rant as long as we wanted. But there’s a catch: it’s Discord. If you want to scroll back up to that ancient rant you wrote that one time, good luck, pray to whatever superpowerful force/entity you believe in, and hope Discord’s search feature works alright. And hope even tighter that Discord never goes away, and it will, and every single thing you ever ranted about will go away forever with it. And if you think I’m paranoid, and that Discord will never go away, I’m guessing you joined the Internet later than I did and missed all the previous chatting platforms like Skype, Teamspeak, Steam Messages, and a bunch of others that used to be super popular that all gradually have gone into disuse, everything said on it disappearing into the abyss of the forgotten Internet.
It’s painfully common to see people treat Discord—be it servers or DMs—as timeless Internet Archives. Even I’ve often used it for long-term storage of files I don’t want to lose, stored instructions on tech solutions and modding for my friends, and compiled resources that I found helpful. But I’ve come to realize this is a seriously dangerous use of Discord. Discord is an Internet messaging application, and it should be treated that way. Nothing on Discord is going to stay there forever. Discord is not going to stay there forever. This is another reason why I’m building this website—to replace a couple of those “long-term storage” uses of Discord.
So…what option do we have?
Well, I’ve recently come into knowledge of an age-old form of journaling that ancient peoples used to refer to as “Blogging.” Apparently, they just wrote stuff and hosted it on the Internet somewhere. People even bought domains. Crazy, huh?
It does sound crazy when we’re so used to how our contemporary, corporate-Internet functions. But really, it makes a lot of sense. Here are some neat things about it:
If you watched the video I linked earlier in this blogpost, you’ve heard most of the points above. Obviously, I’m biased towards this system. I’ve worked on it, it fits my skillset and passions, it affirms some of my political and philosophical views, and I’ve invested time into it.
So, for the sake of fairness, I’m going to go over one unfortunate issue I can foresee people having with this: it’s simply less convenient.
Around a year ago, for my first ever college course, I read The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. As someone who has been using the Internet since the age of four (no, I wasn’t an iPad kid), when I saw this book on the reading list, I was instantly a little uncomfortable. The idea of something I’ve literally grown up with being something that has had adverse effects on my development and mind wasn’t something I was sure how to handle. Yet as I read it, I came to understand and agree with many of its central points, and it even opened my mind to a larger point that is still with me: convenience is a trap for decay.
Now, if that sounds kinda wild, I don’t blame you. Isn’t convenience good? Doesn’t it free up our time to do things of actual value, rather than wasting it searching for information, getting somewhere, or, in this case, building a place for your rants and your thoughts?
As much as this is a place for rants, I really don’t think this is the post to discuss each and every one of those topics. But what I will rant about is how, if you are letting a matter of “inconvenience” stop you from learning and trying something new, I think you’ll find yourself stumped in growth. Growth comes from inconvenience, not from fleeing from it, but from running into it and fighting through it. I wanted to make a website. Was it inconvenient? Yes. Did I enjoy it? At times, yes, at other times, no. Would I do it again? Absolutely.
Over the course of the past year, I’ve made my life less convenient in many ways, from the way I make my coffee, to how I get my food, to how I get to school, to how I manage my computer, to where I write out my rants. And each time I’ve made my life more inconvenient, I’ve actually found myself happier. More fulfilled. I think if you do the same, over a period of time, you’ll find your life feels more full.
So, that’s why I made it. But how did I make it? If you’re now interested in doing the same, how can you?
As I explained earlier, I spent a couple weeks learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and Git from The Odin Project around a year ago. I really recommend starting with that. It’s easier than you think, they make it super simple.
I personally used Astro as it’s primarily pure CSS and HTML along with some fancy Javascript. It also has some neat features like YAML frontmatter and even supports writing your blogposts (like this one!) straight into Markdown and converts it into HTML for you. If you don’t know what any of that means, that’s okay lol. The point is that I think it makes web design easier, and also preserves some neat things about web design like keeping everything primarily written in HTML and CSS (I have no qualms about Markdown as it’s an excellent format). Anywho, I do want to give credit to Viper for an awesome website that I took inspiration from.
I followed the basic tutorial that Astro provides, and spent $6 on the aurabora.org domain from porkbun, which will cost me ~$10/year to renew.
I’m still iterating on everything from style, to features, to content, but I’ve set up what I consider a strong foundation to continue my work on, and I’m excited to continue working on it into the future. Thank you to everyone reading this, and I hope you’ll follow me on this next ride.