I made a website
I've been wanting to build a personal site for a while. Or really a shoddy general-purpose server to host whatever fun services and applications I feel like. But also a personal site: A place to advertise myself to the world, a place to show off interesting projects I've been working on, a mural to paint as I wish, and somewhere to dump my unsolicited thoughts and feelings unto the world.
Though I was already interested in building a server for technical and nerdy reasons, I was inspired in the past year especially to make a website by a sort of nostalgia and appreciation for the "old internet", or the "slow internet" or the "small web". I think there's a lot of virtue in the old way the internet works. Both in a principled ideological sense - a yearning for a slower, more careful, more personal approach to the internet - as well as a love for the technical simplicity of the old web. I'm not going to retread these arguments, there's plenty better writing on that around the web, some linked below that inspired me. This site will serve as my entry into that world, my small contribution to make the internet a little more fun.
Being a technically minded person with a desire to build things and show it off, making the site itself was definitely what drew me in more so than what I'd do with it afterwards. So coming up with things to do with this newfound soapbox was a little harder. And I'm not a writer. Especially this kind of post, it's not the kind of writing I do well at. But it felt necessary. The first entry to bring some sort of purpose to the site. Definitely not the last though, writing is fun. All self expression is.
That's the main motivation after all, leaving aside all the philosophy: Making this is fun! And showing off cool shit to the world and your friends feels good. I don't think I'd be writing this with an audience of none.
Some inspiration: