My wife was spending time on marginalia searchš, looking at new retro-themed websites, and also at the Internet Archive, finding our old websites and swimming in the nostalgia. Meanwhile, a Tumblr friend posted about ābrowsing a random dudeās websiteā and finding a page with just a picture and no additional context/information: I bless the rains down in Anaheimš (the ārandom dudeā turns out to be Douglas Crockford, inventor of JSON and author of Javascript: The Good Parts.)
All this made me realize some things:
- I did not really have a place to put typo and 12-tone, even though I had modernized them earlier in the year. Wouldnāt it be nice to bring them back, right here in their old home?
- I want Decoded Nodeš to focus on being directly helpful, or at least technically interesting (for the āwar storyā tag), and not cynical or cranky. It isnāt a good place for everything I wanted to write.
- Tumblr is fairly ephemeral, and other āsocial mediaā does not even pretend to be a blog format.
Overall, then, I wanted to write in a more personal voice, flaws and all. I wanted to give the web more heart. Iām sure some old-timer will tell me the heart was gone by the 80ās or the 90ās, but since my parents finally plugged their aging 14.4 kbps modem into a (second) phone line in 1999, itās that 1999-2003 period that I miss.
Well, somewhat miss. We didnāt get even CSS 2.1 support in all browsers until after the Great Stagnation. To write for the post-Internet-Explorer web is as though a great burden has been lifted, or a deep shadow banished.
I also get to choose what I want here. One does not really choose how to make a boxed theme for a platform accessible. If one wants to browse the web without Javascript, and a large platform rhyming with Frogger wants to push people into themes that require Javascript to renderā¦ one will soon find a number of articles unreadable. If a large platform goes down or paywalls itself, then it takes everything it was hosting as collateral damage.
I guess one other inspiration has been the solar powered Web serverš from LowāTech Magazine, which I read about ages ago. (NOTE: the link may be offline, particularly in winter, if there isnāt enough sunlight in Barcelona, Spain to keep the battery charged.) It seems like a good guiding philosophy for my own personal site: if page weight is kept down, so too is data transfer timeš, and therefore energy usage. I donāt have the luxury of literally running the site on solar power, but I can follow the aesthetic.