About a month ago I started looking into how websites and the underlying hosting worked after being inspired by several videos I found about the “Indie Web”, “Open Web”, “Web Revival Movement” etc. I don’t think it’s so much a coordinated movement or anything, just people nostalgic for how the Internet used to be, or younger people fascinated by the alternative to the usual social media slop sites. Me, of course, falling into the former.

The easy route seemed to be setting up a static website on a service like Neocities but in my head that appeared to be counter to the spirit of the project, because you’re still relying on what is basically just another social media company to hold your data, you’re subject to their rules and terms and they could pull the plug at any time. They do seem like a chill company though, I just wanted to be awkward I guess and self-host on my own hardware.

I made the mistake of starting out by using WordPress. It’s all still self-hosted and I have full control over the site and everything, but it basically means I’ve missed a lot of important learning and there’s a lot of things to learn! It went from thinking I’d learn a little HTML to also needing to learn CSS, JS, PHP and possibly also SQL in the future for the underlying database that powers this blog, something Neocities doesn’t have. So far JS still looks like gibberish to me but I’ve started getting used to the other two in order to make a WordPress theme. I think before I make this site live, I’ll set up the layout in Neocities as a static page as well just to show that I can without having the WordPress framework there as a crutch.

As I’m writing this, the site isn’t live yet anyway, but I’m happy with how it’s coming along! I got some art commissioned to use in the site theme and threw together a banner and buttons, it’s all real pretty!