Blog » A Breath of Air
geocities internetI think it looks great.
I stumbled across https://cameronsworld.net the other day. Go and visit it and come back here first. It's a fantastic full on, in-your-face torrent of nostalgia for the 'internet'. People had websites, web sites, both carefully, and care-freely maintained, tinkered with and tended to.
This was your space, a well-curated slice, expressed in glorious web colours, offensively naff gifs, and poor typography.
Worse is better.
My fatigue with the modern internet is wearing thinner and thinner, with this overwhelming sense of the bottom falling out of everything.
LLMs feeding LLMs, feeding SEO, feeding clicks. Sponsors and affiliate links, and affilliate links being hijacked. Rage bait, click bait, engagement bait. Follow for part two.
To say nothing of the people who ultimately own these platforms distorting all of our lenses into the world, to each other, etc.
Choose Life!
My first exposure to programming proper was my first ever 'homepage'.
I don't remember where or how it was hosted, but I had a very
well-tended garden of PHP includes, meticulously crafted sprites, and
the finest collection of absolute positioned elements
you'd ever seen.
There was something so immensely satisfying about punching in code
into BBEdit, hitting refresh in the browser and watching my creation
come to life. The magic of editing navbar.inc.php and
seeing it update across all of my pages.
This website is my 'love letter' to those days, and a nice full-circle return home, some fifteen or so years later. The site follows those very same principles as a few EEx templates, and some spaghetti build scripts.
The ginormous tech platforms do control basically all the 'the internet'.
But the thing about the internet is that it's not finite, or zero sum, you can just make more of it. Just buy a domain, stick a few pages up on a webserver and you've got your little slice of gif-and-banner peace.
Targeting amateur Geocities in both style and substance is the most freeing part. Under a thin veil of irony I can throw my photos up as glorious 256x256 jpegs (and in the process strip out the spurious EXIF data Meta inserts), write a blog which I'm sure no one will read, and just generally do whatever I want.
Nice.
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