Site design tribulations.

My website design values have certainly changed alot since I've started doing all this last year, seems like I nuke my HTML and CSS every other month. I feel the urge to apologize for that but I don't think I need to, the possibilities a personal website gives you, when you don't have to follow some sort of corporate or modern standard, is quite overwhelming!

Your own website, where you can do whatever you want, such a prospect, the world is your oyster. To me though, being given too much of your own accord can be detrimental. I seemed not to think for myself during many of my sites iterations despite my own words of "my site is for solely me", and rather tried to build my site to look as "cool" as possible, as if it was a diorama for others to gawk at in hopes of recieving some kind of grativication, rather than be an extension of myself.

To elaborate, many people with personal sites are of the "modern web/social media sucks" mindset which includes me aswell; I'm certain thats perhaps one of the most universally agreed on opinions for anyone who doesn't ride the 2-inch erect cock of a billionaire or is a bot trying to siphon engagement. It's the sterility that makes people wanna make faux geocities sites, accessibility nightmares, and pages with enough contrast and gifs to make Dennō Senshi Porygon look tame; I stated those categories of sites as a form of endearment, and not out of contempt; Expression of ones self is a lovely thing to bear witness to, whatever the form is.

That said... I find myself enjoying simpler, and more focused websites, mainly those with alot of writings or other creations (and outside the scope of neocities), Reason being that it's an interesting way of getting to know a complete stranger whom you'll never, ever meet. You'd be surprised at just how much you can understand someone's personality, ideals, hopes, dreams, etc, based on they way the write or the like; even if it's someone who you would never want to interact with if you were to meet them in person, It makes me oddly happy to learn about them. Makes me wonder how much of myself I'd like to express through the web.

Hence why I redid my website, though this time i'm treating it more like a reboot? (I don't like that word.) I was discontent with my website for a long time, and wanted a fresh start and a blank canvas to work with. Also doing other good practices that I never did with my old site like, actual organization, oh, and using a static site generator is lovely, makes things plenty more convenient than copy pasting a page every time I wanna do something new. Hooray for workflow.

Bloat/Clutter/Whatever you call It I've been very conscious about aswell. If I've learned absolutely anything from designing a personal site, is that Javascript Bad, for reasons that elude me besides a vague "privacy vulnerability" issue, Don't know how much that rings true, but decided to ditch all the scripts from my site anyhow, bar the script that randomizes a phrase under my site's logo, because variety is still the spice of life for me, plus I added a noscript fallback anyhow, and also my guestbook, cause I am unable to use PHP. Images I've also been wary about, so I've decided to cut down on them aswell, I feel like this all pays off; My site doesn't take 10 seconds to load so theres that in terms of gratification. I'll never let go of music on pages though, an objectively annoying thing to do that I think is very fun.

All this to say and all this effort into my site once more purely to attain a goal, to simply Do More with madeinv.love. My sole home on this godforsaken internet...