The simple joy of websites

Cover photo: my canine buddy Clarence living his best life at 6 am.

Towards the end of 2024 I toyed with the idea of writing down my thoughts on the state of the web. I wanted to talk about how the corporate web is tripping over itself to lock down open platforms, and that algorithmic echo chambers are a bigger threat to society than LLMs – but I just don’t have the energy.

I love the web, just not that web.

I love the indie web – the network of creatives, engineers, makers, and tinkerers. The people who make art. The people who do it for fun.

There’s something wonderfully simple and delightful about having a corner of the internet for your creative endeavours and thoughts, and I don’t use mine nearly enough.

I recall playing with HTML on GeoCities in school around 2002, and hacking away at CSS on MySpace at college in 2005. I registered my first domain in 2007 while at university to host Flash animations and code experiments. My earliest blog posts date back to just before I started my first web development role in 2010.

Every step of that journey was fun – frustrating at times, sure, but rewarding. I’ve learned a lot through having a personal website, and I wouldn’t be the software engineer I am today without it.

The internet is undergoing the biggest platform shift we’ve seen in over a decade, in a way that will almost certainly affect my career. I’m worried about that. But what I’m not worried about is my interest in the web as a hobby. No matter what happens to the corporate web, the indie web will still exist for genuine expression and creativity.

Websites are dead. Long live websites.