There is a growing discontent around the current state of the World Wide Web. Web 1.0 felt like a place of freedom and creativity. Maybe I'm being romantic, for sure had to have its issues... But remember the whimsical sites in Geocities, the simplicity of email discussion lists or the anonymity of IRC?

For a while now, I've been slowing working on a refactor of the codebase of this blog. At one point, I got caught in exciting world of performance and I wanted to make sure I had a super fast pageload. Currently, my CSS is added inline in the HTML and I found myself thinking "no one will be able to read this".

The web was established with the best of intentions. The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top. The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.

This chain letter-esque post has been doing the rounds, and in the spirit of trying to rebuild my blogging muscle I thought what better to blog about than blogging? This post is a bit of a love letter to having your own place on the web, no matter how simple.

Personal website manifestos. I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written. So for now, here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.”