Hello World! And Self-Expression Online | 3-4-24

So...here we are! A Neocities page, just for me! Honestly, it feels really nice having a space to myself again.
The old internet was something I was never quite familiar with. Sure, I grew up on forums and YouTube and DeviantART and such, but I wasn't really around during the time that personal sites were commonplace. The most I really had exposure to in that regard was MySpace, and the old YouTube layouts you could actually personalize.

But this? All of this is so fresh! I'm learning a LOT about writing HTML and CSS files, something I'd never really messed with before now. It kind of feels like I'm learning to use the internet all over again. My code is most definitely messy, but I am having a lot of fun with this! The more I work with Neocities, the more I wonder why making your own website like this isn't common practice.

I mean, it's a LOT of fun, you learn how to format HTML and CSS files, and you get your own space to put WHATEVER you want! I could even put an image in here!

See? That's fun! Being able to do whatever you want with your web space is fun!

On the other hand, though, I kind of understand why the internet has condensed down into just a few sites and things like Carrd are so popular. Learning this has been hard. There have been times, I will shamefully admit, where I've wanted to just SLAM my head against my desk because I just couldn't understand why something wasn't aligning right, or how to properly implement side-by-side images in a gallery format. But thankfully, sites like Stack Overflow and W3Schools have saved my ass time and time again!

I think this stuff is pretty accessible once you finally get the hang of it. Sure it's hard to get into, but once you know the basics, you just kind of get into the "flow", you know? I think its the difficulty of finding that flow-state that drives people away. But people clearly yearn for this kind of expression! Carrd and Renpy are super popular and used by a lot of people to express themselves and put hotlinks to their other stuff!

Neocities, and self-hosting in general, provides so much more freedom compared to those platforms, and I feel people that use Carrd would love the options self-hosting would give them! It's just a matter of helping people get into HTML writing and providing easy to use, powerful resources for setting their site up.

I've kind of lost the point of this blog post a little. Generally, what I'm getting at is: Neocities, and self-hosting in general, is fucking awesome and more people should do it; and those of us that do should try to help anyone wanting to get into it as much as possible! If we want a return of cool personal sites everyone can share with one another, we need to put the effort into sharing resources--there's more resources for HTML and CSS than ever now, you just have to find them. This has been an awesome experience and I'm looking forward to doing more with my site in the future!