Being honest, blogging is very fun; I never expected a simple website to bloom into a large hobby. The first time I ever tried blogging was in middle school when English classes demanded us to run a Google Blogger site. I ended up uploading some content befitting a middle school student before shutting that site down years ago. Before that, I wrote fictional stories when I shared a laptop with my parents; they thought that I could be an author in the future. And about 10 years later here I am, not an author, but running my own homebrewed blog free from corporate platforms or services like Wordpress, Blogger, or Javascript frameworks. It’s a fun hobby that allows me to relieve stress, express my thoughts, practice using English in different ways from day-to-day talking, experiment with and learn HTML/CSS, and maintain a server. Not to mention that I’ve gradually accumulated articles that essentially build a profile of my interests, like a social media profile except this one is genuinely unique.
An amateur “web dev” and the modern internet
Learning HTML and CSS has taught me some important things. The first thing is the work that it took to get here; I have some other services running on this domain and to build my way up here I had to learn some fundamentals of networking: IP addresses, DNS, firewalls, port forwarding, SSH, reverse proxies, and a lot more. It’s general knowledge that’s good to have and now I can brag to people that I finally understand what 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.2.1 means, no matter how trivial these are from a more knowledgeable person’s perspective.
The second part is gaining the ability to create static websites. One day I’ll experiment with static site generators but for now these pages are just plain handcrafted HTML files, trying curling one. In just a few minutes, I can create a very basic website that is functional and simple, then theme it with CSS so that the site doesn’t scare off people. Most people nowadays will think that sites like this are antiquated and that shiny animated Javascript sites are the new standard, but after seeing some problems with modern sites, seeing static sites makes me happy.
The third point builds off the second one, in a bad way. Because every site has (too much) JavaScript in them, modern websites are fragile and bloated. For those that don’t know what JavaScript is, it’s essentially code that can run in websites to add interactive features not possible with pure HTML, such as search bars or likes/dislikes. There’s a browser extension I use called NoScript that lets you control what scripts run on websites. The more scripts you block, the faster the page loads, less junk runs in the background, and the more broken the website is. Here’s a good example, the screenshot directly below is an entry from KnowYourMeme with all scripts disabled. In the top-right box, you can see 10 scripts and 1 font are blocked. See how no images load and the menu bar icons aren’t rendered? This means that Javascript needs to run to render those.
Now I enabled some bare minimum scripts to render images and fonts. Look at how the number of blocked scripts somehow increased, and there’s nonsense like Facebook scripts trying to run. Think of this as proof of data companies tracking you across all websites.
Most of all modern websites are like this, let one script run and it tries to call in two more that are needed to make the site not broken. These scripts being blocked are all trackers, ads, and other junk that is not necessary for functionality. How dumb is it that by not letting a script run, some websites can’t render images and some don’t even render any text! It’s absurd that HTML files, which are designed to render text on a browser, have that dependent on scripts to run. All of the text and images on this website are done through pure HTML.
Look at this website, you’ve probably haven’t noticed it but the site loads pretty fast; and it’s not as if I have company-level bandwidth. That’s because it’s minimal; there is nothing but text and images. Maybe there’ll be small videos in the future, but as of now everything is optimized for compactness. And there are no scripts running here, nothing here breaks when you disable Javascript because there’s nothing to break. This site isn’t a banking site so obviously it can get away with being pure HTML, but most sites that aren’t really interactive still use tons of unnecessary scripts. It’s a disappointing internet. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to say that JavaScript is bad. Just like most things, it can be good in moderate quantities.
Positive benefits
I’m digressing with another negative rant, so let’s switch topics and talk about more positive points that this website has brought me.
A new hobby
There’s a classic but common story of a gamer going through their library to find titles to play, only to complain that none of the 50 games they have on backlog are interesting and instead the person consumes Youtube videos for the next two hours. I have a similar issue with this, I can’t play games as easily as I did years ago; the motivation simply isn’t there. After opening this website and blogging, the writing provided to be a nice hobby. It actually relieves stress, allows me to be creative, learn, and do something I enjoy. It’s essentially a near-perfect hobby and can be seen as something ‘productive’, though this is isn’t a big deal personally.
Sharpening language skills
People older than zoomers will remember that at one point books were a widespread thing. Well, they still are, but the presence of physically printed mediums such as books and newspapers are dwindling continuously with the increasing digitization of everything. While all of my articles are typed, so they don’t offer the experience of being able to physically write, it’s an okay enough activity compared to just flicking your eyes through an infinite amount of short social media posts. When typing, my brain is stimulated to search for new ways to describe, give more impact to sentences, and provide a satisfying reading experience. Over time, I can see potential legitimate benefits such as heightened creativity and writing skills which are useful anywhere. One day I might try writing in other languages as well to further enhance the effect.
Onwards with more ramblings
Really, this website started as a leftover project from simply having a webserver running for non-website purposes. But now it’s a significant focus on what I use this domain for. I’ve learnt about networking basics, HTML and CSS, and gained a stimulating hobby for one package. It’s been a great start so far, and as long as I don’t run out of topics to ramble about this site will see constant updates. I’m excited to see what I can do in the future as I learn and write more. It feels nice to escape consumerism and be a unique type of producer for once.