Small Web September Kick-Off/Check-In 1: Goals!

[enchantedsleeper]

Somehow it's September already and the kick-off point for Small Web September has arrived! \o/

As a reminder, this is the first of five ‘check-in’/comment points that will be published during the event – you can check out the schedule and dates of these posts over on the event intro. There’s no cut-off point for commenting on these, so you can add something at any time – you also don’t need to comment on them all or do them in order! The themes are a loose guide, but all discussion is welcome.

This first post will be for introducing yourself and your project(s) and talking about what you’re planning to do during the month. Of course, there’s no obligation to stick to what you’ve set down and no-one will be checking up xD But it can be a nice thought exercise! You’re free to make the goal(s) as broad or as specific as you like – it’s totally up to you.

There’s no set format for this check-in, but here’s one you can use if you’d like (just copy-paste and replace the placeholders with your own answers in the comments):

<strong>Name:</strong> (Username, nickname, whatever you like to go by)
<strong>Project(s):</strong> (Share a link to your project(s) if you’d like to, and/or describe what you’re making or would like to make!)
<strong>What are you hoping to work on for SWS?</strong> (This can be as general as “add to my site”, or as specific as “archive X fanworks” or “implement a responsive layout”. You could even include ‘bonus goals’ – more ambitious things you’d like to get to if you have time!)

Also, if anyone would like to answer it, here’s a discussion starter: What interests you about the small/indie web, and how did you learn about or get into it?

Comments

[annathecrow]

Definitely not! Grab whatever you like :D Actually, if you want some code snippets/files just let me know, I'd be happy to share.

I should have made the whole thing a public GitHub repo from the start, dammit. It didn't occur to me, and now I have dumb notes in the README and I would have to do some git splicing to clean it up and augh, so much hassle. Maybe I can make that one of my SWS goals XD

[bluedreaming]

Name: bluedreaming
Project(s): a hopefully user-friendly guide to writing your own rss file that's podcast compatible, for a fannish context. wip here on the squidge fandom resources wiki
What are you hoping to work on for SWS? ideally finish it or at least get it to a useable state!

What interests you about the small/indie web, and how did you learn about or get into it?

I learned how to html as a bored teen with limited internet (think ten minutes max a day; this was a location/cost limitation) and notepad + geocities. I figured out where websites stored files on our computer because enya's website had an automatic player that would load songs in the background. I guess everything spun out from there!

What I like about it: you can do it yourself, or aspire to. It’s understandable by a single person with reasonable background knowledge. The beauty of a simple html website’s source is profound.

[alaterdate]

Hooray! I'd love to add you to my blogroll once you get your site up.

[axolotls]

Thank you, will do! And ohh, good luck with that!

[enchantedsleeper]

Your sites are looking great - I particularly like the fashion site! I don't have the patience to do much with fashion myself but I enjoy living vicariously through people who do :D Wishing you luck with fixing up your CSS and bordering!

I've never done well with traditional social media because I just can't make myself post every day or make lots of image posts.

Very much same here. Although I really like Dreamwidth, I think my "circle" here is still small because I don't blog very consistently (it would also be good if I could find more time to leave comments and engage, but I struggle to do that frequently too). Pillowfort is more forgiving of my sporadic activity bursts but I'm still not as active on there as I aspire to be. So, I feel you. But making indie websites is cooler anyway 😉 (Jk, jk)

[enchantedsleeper]

I love that you're doing blogging and mod stuff as well as Neocities! I also have blog posts that have been lingering on my to-write lists for way too long ^^;; Also, Writer's Salon looks like a great initiative ❤️

I also really like that you have conlangs on your site! That's super cool! Best of luck with the revamp (and your other goals)! <3

[enchantedsleeper]

*waves* It's great to see you here :D <3 And, thank you so much for the kind words about the challenge! I'm excited to be hosting it and I also love everyone's projects, thoughts, and goals.

Any progress you can make this month is great progress ^^ A whole-site revamp is a big project, so, I hope you have been able to find ways to break things down and make them more manageable. Wishing you luck and inspiration!

I love that they are personal archives of very specific nerdy subject matters, that they are informative in a way that, say, Wikis aren't, and that they are so versatile when it comes to creative expression (I love looking at layouts! seeing the thoughts behind a site name! browsing navigations! reading essays and meta! perusing personally curated galleries! seeing personal associations with other media! checking out link lists!).

This is such a great summation of why shrines are amazing! I totally agree :D The way they marry together information, creativity, and personal thoughts on a character, fandom, or other subject is brilliant. And yes, they are so versatile ^^ One day maybe I'll create one (or more!) of my own, but I get lots of enjoyment as it is out of seeing other people work on their shrines and share why they love them <3

[beetmint]

Name: Beet
Project(s): My neocities page, general fanfics
What are you hoping to work on for SWS? I’m hoping to finish up my neocities site revamp (adding in more responsive layouts/templates and having less images clip through the site), my deadline was for the end of August but I didn’t finish up on time, and after that I’m likely planning to either finish up or reupload a bunch of fic ideas/one shots that have been sitting on my hard drive for a bit.

What interests you about the small/indie web, and how did you learn about or get into it?
I kinda got into it after moving off tumblr and checking out smaller sites like pillowfort, but the real answer is that I had already had a neocities page for an currently dormant fandom interest and decided that I’d spruce it up a bit to feature all sorts of different things. Actually, my first foray into this sort of thing would’ve probably been a bit earlier when an old comic site I used to frequent got bought out and everyone had to scramble to archive everything off it, when I had already seen a bunch of sites go down beforehand and I guess I just forgot about the instability of things that seem stable.

[pauraque]

It would be an honor! XD

[pauraque]

Yeah, I am really feeling the need for more hours in the day!

[silvercat17]

Thanks!

[muttthecowcat]

Thank you!! Honestly, I struggle with dreamwidth too, but it's much more my pace than some of the other options. I really do enjoy coding so far, so it's actually easier for me to make myself update my sites than to just type a post into any other site

[meteordust]

Name: Serenade

Project(s): My fic archive on Dreamwidth, which I set up last year, but haven't tinkered much with since.

What are you hoping to work on for SWS?
- Update the index with FF.Net links
- Add various ficlets I haven't done yet

What interests you about the small/indie web, and how did you learn about or get into it?
Back in the '90s, I loved building personal websites and fandom websites, on GeoCities and Tripod and similar webhosts. It was so much fun to make something unique and individual and have all the choices completely up to you. I feel like my skills and knowledge are very dated by now, and I like having an interface like Dreamwidth's to do the heavy lifting. But planning how to structure the content is still very appealing to me.

[quillpunk]

Name: Ren (quillpunk)
Project(s): 10001 Nightmares Party, a personal fanfic archive.
What are you hoping to work on for SWS?I want to cross-post all my works from AO3 to 10001 Nightmares! There are almost a hundred of them though, so it's going to take a minute, lol.

What interests you about the small/indie web, and how did you learn about or get into it?

Basically, I find big, active places/sites to be very 'noisy' for lack of a better word. There's so much Stuff Happening, New Fics Being Posted on AO3, etc., that in a sense it's both a little bit alienating (though that's better when you're in tiny fandoms), and overwhelming. I like it when things are quieter and neatly organized, and I enjoy the opportunity to impose my own color-scheme (literally) on people on my site.

I don't know how I got into the smallweb (⌒_⌒;) I just like the idea of smaller, quieter, more personal sites :D

[enchantedsleeper]

The plan is to modify the theme I'm currently using to be more website-like and recategorize the posts I currently have. It's best done before the blog gets much bigger, so I jumped on this event as an opportunity to get started.

I'm glad that the timing works out in that way! :D Good luck with your reorganisation, that sounds very cool. (I enjoyed reading your blog post about house cleaning - little and often is what I aspire to as well, so it's nice to read about someone else making that work).

Yeah I bought two URLs for the same site, I just couldn't resist either of them! >_<

Valid, they're both great URLs xD

I firmly believe everyone who creates stuff to share with others should have their own online space independent of corporate social media, and I love the creativity and freedom of personal websites!

Absolutely - the situation with content purges of NSFW stuff is particularly grim, and multiple peeps here have cited it as the reason for building their own spaces, which I think is great and very smart. Even non-corporate social media like Pillowfort can be precarious (their donation situation is currently very hand-to-mouth) and in retrospect, making your own space really is the solution to all of the endless fandom (and non-fandom) migrations - not A Social Network Of Our Own as people keep suggesting. I know it can seem intimidating, of course, but I hope the word continues to spread about how fun and doable it is!

[enchantedsleeper]

Awesome, good luck with your Neocities site! I don't often link mine around either as I feel like it still needs a lot of work, but it's improving all the time xD I hope you can get to a point where you feel happy to share it ^^

Plus, I ended up finding out that I think coding stuff is actually pretty cool, haha.

Same here! Until I came to make my archive, I hadn't worked on anything like it since about 2016, but I remember how engrossing and satisfying it was to tinker with code and make it work. While I originally had planned to just set up my archive on WordPress to save myself some of the heavy lifting, I realised that I did want to code it myself and have the satisfaction of making it all customisable and adding dumb 90s web touches like pixel art and blinkies. Even if it looks less polished as a result xD

[enchantedsleeper]

What a lovely comic name! It's a shame I'm not familiar with BG3, as I love fancomics (and comics generally). Wishing you luck balancing your goals and Small Web-ing with all the other things that are going on 🍀

[enchantedsleeper]

I'm committing to working on my site every morning before work on workdays. I hope to use that time to develop a real homepage and transfer material from my Wordpress blogs to my Neocities site, but more than anything, I want to give my site time and attention every morning.

That's an awesome commitment! I would like to do something similar (though I also keep meaning to make time for writing in that way xD), or even just have a weekly slot, which would add up a lot over time. Best of luck with your site work!

Back in the "old days," that kind of creative control was completely taken for granted. Even MySpace gave users a lot of creative freedom over their pages.

Yes, exactly - I was saying this in reply to another user too, that it's weird mentally comparing the mid-00s web that I 'grew up' on to what we have now and remembering how you could use HTML and CSS to customise profiles and pages and make them your own. It was just baked in. And then Facebook et al made the identikit web cool and sites collectively went "well people don't want to do things themselves so let's not bother, everything should look minimalist and the same" and now here we are. *world-weary sigh*

[enchantedsleeper]

That's a great tool! I'm not sure whether you're making it for general use or just for yourself, but I have a group of friends who'd enjoy playing around with a tool like that if you do make it more widely available :D I really like all of your linked sites and projects, too. I'm going to raid the games and toys when I have a moment, they look like great fun :D

I'm hopeful people are coming around to how much unneccesary complexity there is in the frontend these days. PHP + vanilla JS or JQuery answer SO many of the questions that you need to code up these days - even without a furtther framework. My sites last for decades and when I go to fix 'em up there's no build process or upgrade that's broken down... things just work

I enjoyed reading the Lex Friedman podcast transcript on your site that also goes into this and how Pieter sort of accidentally built 'old-skool' sites that kept doing their thing xD I'm very far from being a web developer although I learned PHP around 12 years ago to achieve what I wanted to do with a site I was running, and it worked well for me back then! If it ain't broke (and it does what you need to)...

[enchantedsleeper]

Aaaabsolutely XD And thanks very much! \o/

[enchantedsleeper]

A few years ago, I concluded that it wasn't my place to judge which of my fics were worth sharing, so I dug up all my old and embarrassing work (well, everything that was finished and at least a thousand words long) and posted it on a backup AO3 account. I suppose, if even one person reads and enjoys them, it's worth a little embarrassment.

Right! I think this is good to remember - and I like having them as a record of my participation in fandom, even if it is early and awkward participation. (My author's notes were particularly weird, often a combination of aggressive and self-deprecating that was probably mimicking the tone of other users whose works I read at the time. That sort of "well it sucks but I published it anyway! here!!!" xD I didn't have to preserve those, but they're part of the whole, and the disclaimers are particularly of their time).

Your unfinished WIP section is reassuring; thank you for linking to it! I was thinking 'would it be silly or pointless to archive these little scraps, many of which are just silly things I wrote as a kid?', but seeing your site helped me realise that, if anyone else did the same thing, I'd just think it was a cool little thing to include.

Well, thank you very much! It's a useful tactic, actually, to think 'If I saw that someone else was doing this, would I judge it as harshly as I am doing for myself?'

I've been part of a lot of fandoms where I only got around to publishing one thing, or didn't finish anything, but I put some time and energy into ideas that didn't make it to a site like Fanfiction.net or AO3. I've often thought I would pick them back up, but most of them are at a point where I don't remember where I was going with them, so, that's when the idea of archiving them occurred to me. It doesn't come with the mental pressure of feeling like I've submitted them for Public Consumption(TM), but at the same time, if someone does want to read them and enjoys what little is there, so much the better! So, in other words, I encourage you to do it if you like the idea :D

[kalloway]

TY! It was some eight-menus-deep confirmation for something back on LJ and when I saw it, I knew I had to make an icon out of it.

Aw, thanks. It actually took me years after making my account to really post to AO3 because it was too... a lot of things. I really only did the big back-up when I couldn't get in touch with my old host (which has happened again - site is still online but ??? so yeaaaah)...

One of my favorite old things to do was seasonal themes, at least on the home page. I think this year will be out, but maybe next year I can do seasonal changeups at least with graphics if not more.

[kalloway]

Oh yay, another .hack fan! I have admittedly never finished the games, but I love how broad the canon is. I think I'm still missing a bit of the later manga/novels but otherwise I've got a long shelf of it all. It's such a unique series.

I mostly write drabbles and other short things, so yeah. (I'm not good at having huge ideas, just little moments and jokes and filling in tiny gaps.) I suspect it'll take me years upon years to get everything archived but if I can catch up with stuff that's not on AO3 for any reason, either too new or too original or too whatever, it'll be a good start. Then I can chip away at stuff that's already somewhere at least. (I was going to say 'somewhere stable' but I don't entirely think I'd use that word anymore.)

I really do need an excuse to bust out my vintage gifs.

[enchantedsleeper]

Oooh, Linkding sounds like a great thing to know about! My bookmarking practices are chaotic and inconsistent at best but I've long been meaning to get properly set up on something like Pinboard - and then I heard the bad news about Maciej Cegłowski, yeah. So it's great to know I could potentially host my own one! Yours looks very nice 😊 Good luck with setting up the rest of your site!

Re: Finally

[enchantedsleeper]

That's okay! No harm done at all 😊 <3 And that sounds awesome! Translating your shrines is a lovely thing to want to do, and I hope it goes smoothly for you!

What kind of smaller projects have you thought about working on?