Back in the day, I used to create so many freaking websites. I learned HTML when I was 12, from Lissa Explains, and spent many sleepless nights in notepad making fan sites for random animes and movies and basically anything else I could think of. And then, of course MySpace happened, and I was ready. Not ready enough to become instantly cool because, despite popular belief, there isn’t actually enough css experience in the world to get people to want to be your Top 8 friend.
I’ve always been a bit anachronistic when it came to websites. Rarely visited but oft-fussed over, I loved having my own dot com when I was camming on MFC. I also spent hours customizing the MFC profile that “nobody visited”, even putting an easter egg in there for people who really took a close look, and having a secret club for those who found it. I loved having a profile I could customize while all my civilian friends were stuck on Facebook, the cold blue platform of uniformity. Couldn’t relate. I had my own MyXXXSpace profile, a dot com website, and for awhile I even built my own member site where I managed to find some sort of webcam plugin to do shows for fans. Maybe a little ambitious for a wordpress site. I managed to build my own “online now” code snippet that I put in the sidebar, that scraped the MFC profiles page to see if I was online. Until my webhost got grumpy at me for using…way too much bandwidth.
Turns out, I don’t actually know what I’m doing. Ever. 😅
And then link in bio happened. The age of apps. Didn’t realize how good we had it being able to go to Facebook Dot Com and have full functionality of the platform through an actual browser. Instagram was the gateway, and well…it’s all gone downhill from there. I guess Meta has Threads now as well, an app-only Twitter clone? I refuse; I already can’t believe I’m on TikTok. There are even app-only link pages now. I’d never been asked to go to the Play store to build a website before…is this how it is now? Give me my notepad. I want black text in a white box and I want to save it as a dot HTML file in a folder on my big ole’ stupid PC on my desk in my computer room goddamn it. Are we past FTP as a species? Have we evolved beyond such cumbersome tools?
I tried adapting to this new internet of social media apps. My dot com was abandoned, nobody ever went there. I had a name change, existed exclusively on OF (I guess it was only a matter of time until us SWers got the facebook treatment as well), got my own link page I could post in my bios and I even redirected my new dot com to that because, well…why even bother making a website anymore?
Why even bother having my own website when all I really need is a single page linking to all the places I exist online that I have no control over? Nothing to fiddle with, to customize, to design. Just….here’s my instagram. It’s an instagram!
Truthfully, I’ve never been very good at social media. It sucks me in and I spend more time viewing than posting. I compare myself to others. I struggle with expressing myself. People are mean. I’m mean. Why do I go on Twitter and just become the worst version of myself? The noise is…overwhelming. I’m not even sure what to post on social media, or who I want to be there. It scares me, a bit.
I’ve always used websites as a way to sort of guide myself artistically. It’s a way for me to reflect on what I have to offer the internet, in a safe space that isn’t brimming with negativity and a million other voices being shuffled through some algorithm. I like using the medium of a website to sort of figure myself out. Figure out my aesthetics, my voice, the way I want to present information. The way I want to present myself. In a way, it’s a deeply personal and often emotional experience for me. There’s something confronting about putting time into something like this, and really seeing who I am, who I can be. It’s painful to not be able to offer all the things I’ve wanted to do but haven’t done.
There’s a real inspiring aspect for me though as well, finally creating a space that I can fill with the stuff I want to make, especially in today’s mobile internet. At the risk of sounding like a fucking nerd; I feel genuinely so inspired right now, having built this silly little website. I made it so the front page reads as basically a link page for mobile visitors…maybe a few will click around to this blog, but I assume most will find the links they’re looking for and that’s great too. But I know it’s here, and it feels like home to me. It’s a brand new bullet journal with endless rolls of washi tape and stickers and colorful pens.
Social media isn’t going anywhere, but maybe having my own little home on the web will change my perspective on creating and remove some of the pressure of endlessly considering various platforms. Maybe this website will help me feel a little more secure and inspired in my existence online and who I am outside of the context of social media.
Anyway, I don’t know if this resonates with many people, but I just fucking love websites. I’ve loved them for over 20 years. And I miss them. I’m excited (and strangely emotional) over doing my part to preserve these things and make my own silly little home on the internet. It reminds me of what I thought the internet could be – not what it became.
