RE: WEB DESIGN, BLOGGING, THE MODERN INTERNET

I hand-coded this website, with a lot of help from W3 Schools and coding forums. It brought me back to my Tumblr days when I used to obsess over my blog's design. I even made templates for other people to use, but I never thought to sell them (dumb 13-year-old mistakes). For years I considered whether a web or UI/UX design career was also in my future, but I'm setting that aside for now, at the risk of spreading myself too thin. I think I have other interests and passions I want to spend more time on; the rudimentary coding I do on this website is enough to satiate my design thirst.

As a kid, when we got our first family laptop, I found my way to building "websites" on Microsoft PowerPoint. Learning the hyperlink feature opened up so many possibilities in my head: I built "websites," quizzes, game shows, anything that needed buttons! Clicking a button led to a different slide, clicking another button would lead you back to where you came from, or somewhere else entirely. I had so much fun. The buttons always had rounded corners too - I never changed.

Then! In 2011, I discovered my first website builder: Weebly. They're still around! I loved it so much that I went on to design a website for my freshman class in high school. I of course made a Weebly site for myself, until a significant chunk of my website-making efforts went to my Tumblr blog, which I discovered that same year.

In college, when I mostly stopped using Tumblr, I also stopped coding. Instead, I started a Wordpress blog and just used whatever minimal theme I liked the look of. It's when I first started book blogging! I only started "seriously" reading in 2017, and was immediately drawn to reviewing the books as well. I'm so happy that blog is still up. I cringe at my old writing, but that only means I've gotten a bit better at it.

I ran that site until the pandemic, when I decided to start hosting my book reviews on Squarespace (and with my own domain!). Those incessant YouTube ads worked on me, unfortunately. I took the site down during law school, but I'm happy to start over. Squarespace felt a bit bloated as a platform for what I wanted to use it for. I customized my Squarespace theme within an inch of its life too, but I haven't gone this down and dirty with HTML and CSS until now. Neocities isn't technically a blogging platform, but you can build one from scratch. I love the control Neocities affords me.

Before I stumbled upon Neocities, though, I briefly considered whether I wanted to restart my book blog on Substack. However, I, for a few months over the pandemic, also had a newsletter over there, right before its boom as a platform. I thus saw firsthand Substack's devolution: it became less of a host for writers and long-form writing, and more like Every Other Social Media in existence, even though it touts itself as otherwise. They introduced a Twitter-like, infinite-scroll microblogging feature called Notes, and are now highlighting video content as well. There was a time when platforms didn't want to be everything. Instagram used to just be for photos, Substack used to just be for articles.

More than the reviews, this website represents my disillusionment with the modern internet. I've been online since I was 13, and I grew witness to the wider internet's enshittification. It's disheartening to see platforms with so much potential for building community devolve into money-hungry, AI-infested hell holes. The internet used to be fun, creative, supportive, safe. The internet used to just be a place, somewhere you can enter and later on leave. It wasn't an all-consuming, omnipresent vortex. It's why I wanted to return to The Small Web. jackapedia puts it more eloquently than I could, but it truly is time to decentralize. Personal websites should be the future. There's so much more to the internet than mind-numbing social media.