A few days ago, I discovered Neocities, a modern clone of the old website Geocities, which allows you to create and publish your own little website, early 2000s style. I remember doing that a looong time ago on Neopets, when you could publish a little webpage for you Neopet. I should probably go back and feed KingPeter_cc, He's gotta be starving by now... (I was reeaally into the Chronicles of Narnia as a kid!)
And that bring us to where we are now! My plan is to manually migrate/convert/format my Wordpress blog posts over to here, which I've been meaning to do anyway because I never did find a good way to back up that site in one fell swoop. Moving everything to here will also allow me to easily move it all to selfhosting if I choose to do that in the future. I really want to get back to a point in technology where I can see and understand the "full stack", or at least the part of the stack that someone could be expected to have understood 15-20 years ago.
I also find it kind of funny that although my actual job is programming, it's such a niche kind of programming that "regular" textual programming, such as in HTML, python, java, or even just C or C++ feels foreign to me. The kind of programming I do for work is in ladder logic or structured text, which are programming languages especially for physical equipment with digital and analog inputs and outputs. It's purposefully simple (as least as far as the instruction set and data types and data manipulation abilities are concerned), so anytime I want to do something "complicated" (such as setting up a table in HTML!) I get to relearn the basics of coding all over again.
I have to admit I'm excited to get back into blogging and sharing my thoughts with the world, even if I'm the only one who reads my thoughts. When I wore a younger man's clothes, I wrote about the importance of writing in permanent media in the modern age. As in, rather than writing in password-protected cloud drives, or on social media websites that could shut down tomorrow and delete in an instant all your years of cat memes and birthday congratulations and posts on your wall from your late grandparents and friends. The reason we know so much about the Founding Fathers, the Constitutional Convention, the reasoning for including or excluding parts of the Constitution is that it was all written down on paper, something that can be stored indefinitely and is not as easily lost as bits and bytes. Imagine if the Ancient Egyptions wrote their stories in the sand along the Nile! Thank goodness for stone and papyrus.
Anyway, it is up to each one of us to ensure that if we want our voices to be heard or read for years to come, we do not give our trust lightly to technology. Hence my hope that I'll stick with writing out my thoughts, big and small, dumb and smart, onto this simple blog. Not because I in particular have important things to say, but so that ten, twenty, forty, or sixty years from now my writings might be included in a "collection" of the world's primary sources for the early 2020s. The history of the world may be found in the records of the powerful, but the history of humanity, of art, of souls; that is found in the records of daily life of normal people.
On a technical note, I think my actual plan for migrating my old blog over here will be to start with all the posts that don't have any pictures, or only have a header picture. Those will be the easiest; any posts with a lot of pictures, such as my travel blog posts, will take some more time because I'll have to figure out how I want to set up my folders on the server side. I also have to either figure out or choose to integrate some javascript to make my website headers and footers all dynamic, because right now if I change it on one page I have to go back and change it on all of them manually. That's certainly within the style of a 20-year-old personal website, but it's also time-consuming with no real benefit other than ~~~those sick 90's vibes~~~.
I might not do that though, because I kind of like the idea of there being imperfections and inconsistencies spread out through my website. Machines can be perfect, but this isn't a machine's website; it's a human's. It's mine, written almost 100% manually by me, so the imperfections are kind of like a "seal of authenticity" of being handmade. Too much today is perfect, clean, flat, and sterile. That all looks nice, I guess, but it's not comfy. I go to McDonalds for food that'll taste 'perfect', clean flat, and sterile, but I go to my parent's house for food that's Good, and homemade.