I’ve been just a little busy with a few things that are (somewhat) relevant, but keeping my focus off this site. In the interest of keeping this active, I’ll be summarizing them in a few posts.

I made a Neocities site. I’ve been working on coding and writing involved with that project, and the experience has caused some kind of true emotional awakening!

Timeline

I started making sites in 1997, and putting them online in 1998. (I made websites on a floppy disc and mailed them to a friend prior to that, since we didn’t have the internet at home.) I stayed relevant on web design and coding trends or changes from 1998-2008, when I started working in a corporate/office job.

Since I was on the computer all day, I didn’t want to be on the computer all night, so 2008 was when I started using templates instead of designing and coding my own sites. Around 2012, I started designing again, but I was still using WordPress to run my sites, which limited many of my ideas.

When I started using WordPress as my primary platform for content delivery, I lost some of the magic of those old personal sites from 1998-2002. I missed having full control, even though it was more work, but there were too many conflicting priorities in my 20s/30s to dedicate the energy.

When I found Neocities last year I knew I had to engage in that community. I knew (!) it was the right moment for me to create a personal website again.

Therapy

I approached this as a therapeutic project, not simply a site build:

1. Sorted through as many old drives as I could (I’ll need to get a floppy disc reader for the older stuff) to immerse myself in the era. I found many of my old sites, writing, graphics and art – plenty to get me back into the mindset that I had at 17.
2. Outlined the site and decided the most useful thing I could offer to a visitor was the snapshot of web history I found in those old drives. Since I kept up with the web design trends, my old designs capture the spirit of what everyone was doing.
3. I read all of my old “about me” pages. This made me cry.
4. I designed my Neocities site from a site I made for school in 2004 – a true blast from the past. I didn’t know about centralized style sheets back then. While building the site, I tried to stay in that 2004 mindset, maintaining all the same difficulties I had with coding back then. It was a fun exercise!
5. I’ve come out with a better idea of why I am how I am, overall. Reading your teenage writing is no joke, but at almost-40 it was very enlightening to see that I haven’t changed that much at the core, and I am, in fact, almost just as dumb as I was then in some ways.

Learning New Stuff

Jumping back into HTML, CSS, and responsive web design has been fun, but through this project I am learning how to design for accessibility, which is the one VITAL skill I didn’t pick up on when I was a kid.

Making up for lost time is daunting as accessibility standards are complex and evolving, but I’m already better equipped to serve larger populations (including my 20 unique site visitors).