River Kingdom - Blog

I now understand why so many '90s and early '00s websites were abandoned and stuck in time forever.

I started this website full of energy and excitement, but once the basics were in place, it started to sink in about what a big undertaking a website is. Life also caught up with me. It's rather difficult to consistently update a website when one is too preoccupied working and barely breaking even year after year.

I'm still alive. I still think of my website and web revival culture. But I have other projects and life matters that get in the way. I'm sure many people who had a personal website decades ago feel similarly.

I wanted this website to have a bunch of cool topics pages and lists of information just like the old days. But first I have to sort all of the information I've collected (which still isn't done, years after I've started). Then I have to take all that information and make it all extra nice and tidy and to format it into HTML. How annoying; the information is there, and yet I have to tediously put a bunch of <p> tags and stuff on it? (I don't want some garbled WYSIWYG generated code either; I want some nice, raw, brute-force HTML, like a stone mason chiselling a sculpture).

There are a lot of other inactive Neocities sites. Perhaps we should be cautious not to burn out in a flurry of excitement. Instead of viewing the web revival as a trendy subculture trying to recreate a particular snapshot in time, what if we think of the personal website as a slow-and-steady project? Constantly under construction, brick by brick, just like our life is under a constant march forward.

For those of us who grew up on the web, hopefully we can understand the real pinnacle of a personal website isn't merely something that was trendy for five years in the '90s, 2020s, or whenever. It's something that we can curate, build, change, chop down, and rebuild for the next 25, 50, or more, years. We can come back and pick up from where we left off a decade from now, and the website will still be young and fresh.

When we find a website belonging to an agèd professor or random blogger, written in basic HTML and continuously updated for 30 years with minimal changes, we should think their website is cool because it's consistent. We shouldn't huff them as a nostalgic drug. We shouldn't think of them as sacred relics from a mystical past that humanity can no longer comprehend. They aren't snapshots of a bygone era frozen in time, either. If they are being updated they are literally today's web! They might have been updated more recently than your own website. They are just as "modern" as some poorly-coded Tumblr theme, social media status update, or the corporate web.

Consistency is the key! Aesthetics and styles come and go, but there is really nothing as timeless as a simple-looking website. (You've seen physical books before, right? Simplicity will always be a good way to display text, on web or paper.) The look of a personal website isn't the real magic, it's the person behind it. The aesthetic of crude formatting and simple colors captures our imagination because it reminds us an actual human is hand-crafting that website, putting in the effort year after year.

The web enables us to self-publish like never before. Articles, art, design, literal books, and so much more. No need to buy a printing press, pay for marketing, and arrange shipping for your book. No need for digital publishing sites either. Throw it into the void on your personal website if that's all you want. If money or popularity isn't the goal, maybe someone will find it decades from now. If you are consistent for decades, you will build a niche and gradually be woven into the "web" of online communities which are part of that niche. You may be lost, rediscovered, and lost once more, but you will be part of the world's story.

Many aspects of the web and digital communication will become timeless (barring technological calamity). Literacy itself was once something reserved for a small handful of elites. Today, the vast majority of the world has basic literacy skills (even if most people on the internet don't have exceptional literacy skills...) Once literacy became common, getting a poem, essay, article, mathematical theorem, philosophical treatise, or book published by a physical printing house could be an impossible task if you didn't have money or connections.

Now we are limited only by our willpower and dedication. What would constitute a successful "web revival"? I suppose it would be a robust culture of personal websites where the webmasters don't burn themselves out en masse. Therefore no subsequent, wholesale "revivals" will be necessary.