Andrew Shaw

I think it looks great.

I stumbled across https://cameronsworld.net the other day. Go and visit it and come back here first.

It's a fantastic full on, in-your-face torrent of nostalgia for the early web. The kind of web you'd surf. People had web sites, carefully, and care-freely maintained, tinkered with and tended to.

Choose Life!

My first exposure to programming proper was my first ever 'homepage'. I don't remember where or how it was hosted, but I myself had a very well-tended garden of PHP includes, meticulously crafted sprites, and the finest collection of absolute positioned elements you'd ever seen.

It was so satisfying to punch code into BBEdit, hit refresh in the browser and watch my creation come to life. The magic of editing navbar.inc.php and seeing it update across all of my pages.

This website is my 'love letter' to those days, and a nice full-circle return home, some fifteen or so years later. The site follows those very same principles as a few EEx templates, and some spaghetti build scripts.

"You can just do things"

So, the ginormous tech platforms do control basically all the 'the internet'.

And the platforms are run by billionaires, who are most interested in high arousal emotions and people being mad at each other and all that stuff, driving engagement etc.

But the thing about the internet is that it's not finite, or zero sum, you can just make more of it. Just buy a domain, stick a few pages up on a webserver and you've got your little slice of gif-and-banner peace. Just like, go somewhere else instead of the big platforms. Email your friend.

Write a blog no one will read!