Blog: Meta
I just added tags to all my blog posts and gallery projects that I consider “incentivised”, i.e. I received the pattern or fabric for free in exchange for pattern testing or content creation.
This all made me think very hard about why I do it, and whether creating this sort of content is at odds with my views about the web (marketing makes the web bad, etc.), so to think it through, I wrote out a piece on the topic of incentivised content.
I’ve published it as a page, rather than a blog post, as I’m using pages to present my stance on something. Blog posts are a point in time. But my stance might change, and if so, I’ll update the page.
If you're not into that, maybe skip this one! (What's this?)
One of the key features I wanted to build for this website was a custom gallery. I previously had a basic one on Wordpress - it was entirely manually managed through their visual block editor. Huge hassle, and very slow and awkward. Eventually I did actually build a database-driven Wordpress plugin to automate it, which turned into a custom page type, but then before I ever put it live, I got fed up with Wordpress and decided to leave the whole ecosystem.
On the other hand, building my gallery in Hugo has been pretty straight forward. The gallery was one of the first things I did in Hugo, so I was learning the tool as I went, and yet it still came together rather quickly! And that’s also considering that I spent ages faffing around with the stylesheets.
If you're not into that, maybe skip this one! (What's this?)
I’m so excited about this new website, I can hardly even express it. Over the last week I’ve been furiously, obsessively, hyperfixatedly putting this thing together, and I am so happy about it.
I’ve been on the web since around 1997. To me, that era of the late 90s to early 00s was the golden era of the web. All those little websites that were entirely mad, entirely chaotic, and entirely human. I guess it helped that everyone was a nerd too, so it felt easier to connect to people.
I’ve recently been feeling nostalgic for the web of that time, and I’ve since learned I’m not alone in that feeling. A few months ago someone pointed me in the direction of the 512KB Club, which showcases websites that are less than 512KB in size, and although I love that, that didn’t exactly scratch the itch for me. Then last week, I stumbled upon the idea of the Indie Web, which led me to the idea of the Small Web… and well, let’s just say I was overjoyed to discover that there is a movement of people building little personal websites in the old-school hand-crafted way. That there exists a rebellion against the huge siloed internet giants that do all the hard work for you, and take away all of your creative freedom, while simultaneously turning you into a data object. Armed with this knowledge, I’ve spent the last week voraciously learning and building myself a brand new website.