It's been about roughly 1 month since I started lurking Neocities and opened my own website.
I wanted to go over changes and things I've thought about thus far.
Probably an engrained habit from former social media use.
The first thing I did was add a view counter and look at how many views I got.
Then I realized I need to stop obsessing over numbers, no matter how meaningless, and focus on what I actually want from the site. So I removed the view counter from the homepage and don't check the views as often. I also hid some pages because I didn't want anxiety to stop me from posting anything.
One of the first things I added was a guestbook. Having to manually check it only to see there was no replies felt tedious.
Who do I think I am?
Even if someone had commented, it would probably be things like "I like your page!" or "Cool site, check out mine!" anyways.
Got rid of the guestbook.
Then I thought, maybe I don't even want to be social. Maybe I want to be a tiny island! Maybe I won't even add a contact option at all!
...But nah I will probably add an email at some point in case someone wants to discuss something.
I also stumbled upon the 32-Bit Cafe community and have been enjoying my time there so far.
Hopefully in the upcoming months I'll have something cool to show idk.
I will admit the first week or two I was definitely enchanted by the old-made-new-again feeling of things.
It felt like rediscovering an old friend. Like a part of my web-self I had forgotten when chasing likes and engagement.
The 88x31 buttons felt so charming.
The pixel art was beautiful, I had forgotten that the web used to have it instead of just in videogames.
The stamps brought back feelings of nostalgia for when I used to look at art on DeviantArt instead of an endless feed.
A community I had wanted to connect to deeper, but was too inexperienced and afraid to at the time.
Looking through all the top website entries, they were all so unique and interesting.
Looking through the last updated and seeing who had just posted something new on their website.
But within a few weeks I noticed something...
Deeper in the iceburg, was a huge site graveyard.
I found myself looking through trying to find something new, only to be met with endless empty sites.
That's when I realized that maybe making a website is harder than I thought at first.
That maybe most people don't want the effort of making and maintaining a website.
I swore to myself that I didn't want to be yet another dead site.
As the weeks went on, I found myself growing tired of the templated sites.
Yes they were pretty, but they were hollow.
My site might be ugly right now, but it's not completely empty.
I also was getting irritated by the constant overstimulation of it all.
Just because you can have 200 gifs on the page doesn't mean you have to.
The 100% saturation text was hurting my eyes.
The same banners and stamps on every page.
The pointless widgets that everyone copy pasted from each other.
Isn't this just replacing one template for another?
Isn't this defeating the point of it being a personal website?
I apologize for being a bit grumpy. Make your site how you want to.
After the novelty of making a website started to wear off, I realized maintaining a website is really tedious.
In an internet of making everything as easy as possible, I had forgotten the frustration of tedium.
Call it stubborness, but I still choose to do it manually. At least for now. lol
One day I found myself dreading having to update my page again.
I had made so many adjustments, but not much to show for it.
My to do list was long, but the actual results were short.
I had to remind myself I was doing this for free, for a tiny audience, and the whole point was to not rush things.
My mental health hasn't been the best. It's usually up and down.
So I'm still trying to find my pace of things.
Despite those negative points, I'm glad I did this.
Having a website makes me want it to be a fun and interesting website to browse.
So I want to add things that I wouldn't have on a regular social media profile.
It also made me realize that I missed the old internet.
I had genuinely forgotten that I used to manually check sites.
I think it was both going from laptop to smartphone and increasing focus on social media.
I'm also enjoying having a place to share other people's content without seeming annoying.
I would like to do response posts in the future to articles I find interesting sometimes.
Another thing I notice is I feel like my creativity is coming back a bit.
In social media it was always "do one niche, as much as possible, and don't go out of that".
But on here I can see my interests all in one place instead of artificially dividing them.
I'm not sure what else to say at the moment.
I might do another post in the future if I have anything new to say about it.
I have more 2023 recap posts I want to do but will probably be posted in early 2024.
If you'd like to reply to this I have a comment box and a contact email.
If you'd like to support what I do, I have a Ko-fi.