Why I Like Having a Web Site

A lot of people have written a whole lot of words about why they made a web site. Somehow, I've basically never actually seen myself in them. I think on some level I Did cover this in my answers to the 100 questions for webmasters questionnaire, but indulge me.

How we got here

I don't really have moral qualms with social media, nor do I really think it's rotting our brains or anything. Well, that's maybe not quite true, but I have very different ideas from a lot of people I've seen about what makes social media a problem, and I'm not in this for some noble ideal about how the internet should work.

I did, however, grow up with fan sites. But while I admired them, I never quite wrapped my head around how you would do that (the old guard of free hosting was already on decline, and I only really knew about Freewebs). By the time I had all the knowledge and drive to do something like that, social media had fully become the norm.

But I did still want to do something like that, deep down. I got to play with having a site for a bit while I was playing online TCGs (Colors is the most well-known outside of the relevant circles, but I also played in Pairings, Artes, and both iterations of Sakura) thanks to the kindness of the community, but I would burn out, the person who I was essentially sleeping on the couch of would drop their hosting, the person running the TCG I was playing would burn out... and so it would always come to an end.

When Neocities first went around I remember going "oh shit, for real?" I had missed my chance at playing on a site like Geocities, but we had that again! ...But I didn't know what to put there. For years I went "man... I'd love to run a site, and I can, but I don't even know what to write... a fan site would be nice but what would even be worth it? I barely post on social media, why would I have anything to say on a personal site?"

By sheer coincidence, I ran into an event dedicated to encouraging people to make web sites, especially fannish ones, right after Tales of the Rays ended service. My path from there was obvious, as I already had a resource related to the game I was maintaining, and I didn't want the game to be forgotten.

Originally this site (Dana's Cradle) was intended as more of a very elaborate shrine, but I got... carried away, and it's now a more normal fan site. But it's not like I didn't want to have any sort of personal expression. And I somehow found myself slowly piecing together this site.

Why I like having a site

For all I waffled and fussed about not having anything to say, it's a lot easier to say things on a site like this, at least for me. I don't like being out in the open, but some things feel pointless to express if the only audience is me. I think a site strikes a nice balance. Social media is inherently a public space, even on your own profile (...on most sites. there's exceptions. But even those are a different dynamic). My site isn't private, but it's mine.

I don't have to let people interact with me. I don't have to know if anyone is reading. I can bury things deep within the directory structure of my site so you can only find them by accident (or perhaps only with very specific intent). While theoretically my site is indexed by search engines (? if I have control of the robots.txt I'm not aware of that fact, so I don't know what it's like), no one is going to come into my mentions because I said a term related to their new startup or their current favourite discourse topic.

I don't even have to follow norms for web sites. I mark when the site was last updated, but I barely tell you what I changed and I don't log past updates. This "blog" and this site will never have an RSS feed, no matter how much I like them. I live in a little hole and I can force you to only see me on my own terms!!! (Kind of.)

It's all very freeing and it's been such a relief to finally feel just a little bit less inhibited. I barely talk about my ships outside of this site. But you can go read like 2000 words of me rambling about my head canons and interpretations for my OTP on here. With the same update I'm publishing this blog post in, I've added fanworks in a medium I feel embarrassed about working in (aka putting in too much effort into making barbies kiss in Blender). I'm free!!