Why did I make this site?

I'm old, so I have a lot of fond memories of the early Internet. It used to be really weird, in a good way! I remember finding people's little personal sites about chainmaille, or taxidermy, or HAM radio, or a million other unexpected things.

Each one was different, and each one felt like a window into the mind of the person who made it. Strange fonts, colours, animated backgrounds, music that would play at unexpected times and you had to rush to find and mute it.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of it was way too much, and horrendous from an accessibility point of view. But it was always surprising, fun, unique, and strange.

You don't see as much of that anymore. I'm sure it's still out there, but it's hard to find. It used to be that if you searched for a topic, those little personal sites are what you found. Nowadays you'll mostly get Reddit threads, Facebook pages, Instagram, YouTube. If the strange little sites still exist, they must get buried in the badlands of the high-numbered pages of Google results.

I'm sure nostalgia is a big part of it, but I think there was something truly nice about those kinds of pages. They were almost always just words and pictures. They were almost certainly not tracking you. Some of them had ads, sure, but lots didn't - and ads hadn't got as good at being creepy yet. They weren't trying to keep you engaged, or get you to rage-share them with your friends, or get you addicted with likes or infinite scrolling.

For the most part, they only existed because someone was passionate about something and they wanted to share it. There wasn't an ulterior motive beyond that. Sites would link to each other not to increase engagement, but just because their authors thought the other site was worth looking at.

So that's why I made this site: to be part of that tradition. I'm not going to put ads on here, I'm not going to track anything (besides what CloudFlare does by default, not much I can do about that). I'm not going to AI-generate content to game Google search results, I'm not trying to build a brand I can sell or something I can monetise, I'm not trying to optimise anything.

I'm just making my little space on the Internet, trying to make it nice, and that's it. Everything you see on here will have been made by me, nothing will be AI-generated. Well, unless there's some relevant reason for it, and I'll always be very clear about that.

I can't promise it'll be interesting. But I can at least promise it'll be earnest.