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I created my first web site in 1995. I hosted the site with my ISP, a local provider in Kirksville, MO. The ISP generously gave its customers a few megabytes of space if they wanted to host a site. The term "static" site didn't really exist then, because most if not all sites were static sites. Just HTML and a few images. No CSS, and certainly no JavaScript—which had not yet been invented.
Sadly this was, I think, pre-Wayback Machine, so there's no record of my dinky little site. Nor did I think to copy the source for preservation.
I "learned" how to write HTML by looking at the source code from other web sites, playing around with things until I either got the effect I was looking for or got tired of futzing and just accepted whatever I'd munged together. It was fun.
The more AI-ified the web becomes, the worse the adware gets, the more I miss the old web when people did things for fun and nobody gave a damn about profit. The reward of having a little weird niche site was ... having a weird niche site! Somebody might read it and you might have a conversation over email or IRC about something interesting.
So, as time allows, I want to spend more time tending to my little IndieWeb garden here. I like the idea of the smolweb, "a simple unbloated web", so I've chucked all the bloat overboard. No content-management system (CMS), no database, no static-site generator, just HTML, CSS, and the occasional image. Maybe. (I am keeping this site in Git, however, to make resurrecting it easier if necessary...)
As you can see, my web-design skills have not improved dramatically in the past 31 years. But I'll be tweaking and tinkering to try to make the site as readable as possible. Please let me know if it's not.
No comment system here, either. Thoughts? Give me a shout on the Fediverse at jzb@hachyderm.io, or by email (jzb at this domain).