Why make your own website?
For me, the learning experience is the main appeal of building this site by hand. I've long been fascinated by technology, and have always liked tinkering with things and discovering how they work.
But there are lots of other good reasons to have a website. Nora Reed gives several in her Website Manifesto. The points about having control over your website and having it be a fallback plan against the enshittification of big social media platforms . Having control of your own site give you a means of publishing whatever you want without being reliant on a giant corporation. You can also use your personal website as a way of connecting your various social media accounts. Share links to your personal webpage on your social media accounts so your friends who you interact with on the platform have means of contacting you should you wish to leave the platform. And you can link to your various social media accounts from your personal site.
Over the last couple of weeks of building out this site, I've also collected some useful links to other website (particularly blogs) on how to build your personal home page. Sharing them here for anyone who is interested (and for me so I have a handy place to find them without cluttering my bookmarks menu).
- The website that inspired me to make this site. HTML for people
- Stefan Bohacek's Resources for keeping the web free, open, and poetic
- freeCodeCamp
- W3Schools
- Elizabeth Lola's A guide to web accessibility
My Plan 9 website
I'm also fond of playing with relatively obscure operating systems. So, last fall, I participated in the SDF Plan 9 Boot Camp to learn to use the operating system. It's an interesting UNIX-like operating system that differs a bit from the convenstions in Linux and BSD variants. I enjoyed learning the system, and one of the exercises was building a webpage using the tools in Plan 9. So here is my Plan 9 site. It's a little rough, but take a look if you are interested.
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