The Internet Was Better When We Made Our Own Websites
I miss when having a presence online meant making a place rather than maintaining a profile.
The places weren't necessarily good. Some were barely readable. There were terrible backgrounds, animated GIFs, visitor counters and “under construction” signs on pages that gave little indication construction had ever begun.
But they felt like somebody's.
A person had chosen those colours. They'd decided that their collection of photographs, their opinions about a particular film and a small JavaScript experiment all belonged in the same place.
There was something appealing about that. You weren't just reading what someone had posted. You were looking around somewhere they'd made.
Now we maintain profiles
A profile gives you a photograph, a short biography and a place to publish things. You supply the content. Almost everything else has already been decided.
That's useful. It makes publishing straightforward and gives visitors something familiar to navigate. You don't have to work out where someone has hidden the menu, or discover that their preferred combination of yellow text and blue background is physically unpleasant to read.
Social platforms also made it much easier to find people and share things without learning how websites work. I don't think the ability to write HTML should be an entrance requirement for having something to say.
But a profile and a website aren't quite the same thing.
A profile asks you to describe yourself within a set of fields. A website lets you decide what the fields should be, or whether there should be fields at all.
You can be wonderfully individual inside somebody else's template. I just miss the individuality of the places themselves.
The unnecessary bits
I have a particular fondness for the things that weren't strictly necessary.
Guestbooks, for example. Someone could visit your website and leave a note saying they'd been there. A visitor counter might announce that several hundred people had passed through. Not especially sophisticated analytics, but rather more charming.
Blogrolls were recommendations with a person behind them. Here are some other places I like. You might like them too.
Webrings connected sites around shared interests. RSS offered a way to follow people's writing without requiring everybody to publish in the same place.
And then there were the sites devoted to subjects so extraordinarily specific that you couldn't help being pleased someone had bothered.
I don't particularly want the terrible backgrounds back. But I like the idea that a website might contain something simply because its owner thought it should.
You could arrive somewhere without already knowing its shape.
A room rather than a business card
Making a website involves choices that go beyond what you write.
What deserves its own page? What belongs in the navigation? Should the reading list sit beside the software projects? Should there be a page for something that only three other people are likely to find interesting?
The typography, colours, arrangement and little interactions all contribute. So do the odd corners that don't quite fit.
A personal website can feel closer to someone's room, study or workshop than their business card. There are things they've made, things they care about and things they've put somewhere because they might want to return to them.
It doesn't need to present a complete, consistent account of the person.
People aren't especially consistent. I see no reason their websites should have to be.
Why triss.dev exists
This is largely why I keep my own site.
It's not really a portfolio. It's not supposed to generate leads. There isn't a content strategy quietly determining whether an article about Marmite supports my professional positioning.
I would be concerned if there were.
My reading, projects, essays and little experiments can coexist here because they're all things I'm interested in. They don't need to appeal to the same audience or contribute to the same objective.
I can write something, put it somewhere sensible and leave it there. Later, I can add to it, change it or build something else alongside it.
I like having a place where these things can accumulate.
Make a website
It doesn't have to be an ambitious undertaking. A single page with a few things you care about is a perfectly reasonable website.
You don't need to build everything from scratch, either. Use a template. Use a site builder. The point isn't to prove that you can configure a web server. It's to have somewhere you can arrange to suit yourself.
Having your own domain and keeping copies of your content also gives you somewhere to return to and a way to take your work with you. You still depend on other services, naturally, but you have more say in what you're making.
And you don't need a professional justification.
Not everything needs to build your personal brand, improve your career or attract an audience. You can make a website because having your own little place on the internet is fun.
Put things there because you think they deserve somewhere to live.
The internet could use a few more weird little websites.