Deep thoughts on building your own website
So earlier this week I asked myself why I abandoned HTML/CSS for my website.
I was catching up on reading the last couple of days of feeds when this post popped up in my feed reader (I have my blog in my feed reader as an easy check to see if my feed still works).
I was about to click next when a thought hit my head. That thought was so bloody persistent that I had to write it out of my system.
Given how the tech bros have made us addicted to social media, what if a different group of tech bros wanted to make us think that we HAVE to use their software to have a website and to blog?
Wordpress was marketed from the start as THE software if you wanted to be serious about your website and blogging. And look! All the themes!
Even the ads of Squarespace in YouTube ads state that if you want a website or domain you have to use their software.
And they made it so sparkly that we forgot all about those simple tools that could create basically the same.
I fell for it and I clearly forgot how much fun it is to create your own website without all the bloat.
I also forgot that you can have a separate blog and website. I had that from the start but somehow felt it made sense to have both on the same url.
And gods, I was working so dang hard on meta tags and on finding the right image, one that so many other people used too, but it was expected of me to do so.
No more.
This is exactly why I love to have found my old website again, and to tinker with it all over.
And I'm not the only one who does. I love to see so many people host their websites on Neocities. I love to see all the beauty that people have put up there, hosting their own code.
It’s all about taking back our power, online.
I also have a separate blog again, this one. It's still linked to my main webside at sylvia.studio but it's its own thing too.
And as an aside: even though I haven’t written the code that builds Mastodon, I do have the same free feeling of freedom over there. I’m not guided along a path created by algorithms. Shown things they want me to see, not things I want to see.
It’s just a place where a bunch of other humans share their lives, and I get to see everything they post in chronological order, new to old.
And that's perfect. It makes sense.
It's human.
PS you can find my 2004 website [here](https://studio.w10.site]