webmastery thoughts
when i first made my website, i wasn't too concerned with the concept of webmastery or having a "webmaster manifesto" per se. i just wanted a spot that felt like it could serve as a collection of things i like/aesthetics i like and miss. but i'm beginning to wonder: is that really what i want my site to be? a cobbled up reflection of the web-gone-by? buttons and blinkies and tons of graphics and non-responsive formatting?
some of this is expressed by the limitations of my html+css knowledge. pretty much all of my pages should work on mobile but they don't look as nice as i'd like them to (some of this also limited by the notion that i generally prefer navigating the web on desktop since theres more visual space and it's a landscape orientation). my about page works nicely on mobile since i actually coded that out. but i don't know very much about web design and coding, so there's only so much i can do before i want to tear my hair out.
so the question is: do i want to know much about coding? i don't think so. i like that i've stepped out of my comfort zone and taken the time to learn the code i have and have stuck with it (flexbox has been a gamechanger) but for me i mostly want my site to feel like an accumulation of knowledge rather than a coding experiment since i don't have a ton of experience and i'm not trying to break into any coding fields or anything either. i want to use my site to share things rather than pin them up on a digital posterboard so to speak. i like to use review sites because i enjoy collecting my thoughts on something i've read/seen/watched after i finish them, and i enjoy looking back on those sites to see what i thought at the time i made my review, even if my opinion has shifted over time.
so i think that's what i want my site to be oriented around more. a landing page of thoughts. i want to tear down the stylesheet and make it feel more like a slightly prettified txt file someone used to arrange their thoughts in a palatable manner. it would make the site feel like a sort of variant on the memory-keeping style of journaling. i want it to focus more on information and words rather than pictures. although i will still keep graphic-oriented pages like stamp heaven because i like the curation aspect. but loading times and being able to look at things on the go is actually more important to me than i thought it was initially. in short, my site should be a spot to share and curate while being simple in appearance so i can focus on the actual curation, rather than be a site organized around the vibe of sites i used to like in the 2000s.
sunny apples was named this way because it was intended to be a homage to the sort of 90s/00s frutiger aero vibes, which is what i really like where the oldweb is concerned. i might end up renaming the site just so i can sort of shed that identity, as i don't think "frutiger aero resort" is suitable for the type of site i am actually trying to run. that said, i like the name sunny apples and i don't want to break any links since people have been kind enough to grab my button (so cool that people want to share my site with others...). however, then we loop back to the original problem i had with social media and why i wanted to leave in the first place. i ask myself: why am i concerned what other people think about me on neocities? the intent here is to run a site not necessarily to transform it into a new branch of social media. i deliberately only have one tag on my site, personal, to avoid falling into that trap -- but i want to be recognizable and to have a sort of 'site identity.' but this is always going to shift, too. i've always really admired people who have been able to stick to just one sort of layout/aesthetic/vibe on their site lol. and i don't particularly want to make a new account either. it's probably just a matter of getting over the hurdle of making a post about it and doing it and being done with it.
anyways, i'm not too sure what the path forward for me and my neocities presence will be, but i think this blog post is a great first step forward in figuring it out.