Have used various shared or reseller cpanel hosts over the years for my very old sites, and then wordpress sites.

Nowadays using Netlify for my static sites. I'm really looking at what I can do statically vs dynamically these days.

I always had my new mail notification set to a remix of the classic that Melon mentioned...

Loved it!

I agree with di on the landline/home phone thing. I hated calling friends and getting their parents or sibblings lol!

I don't miss dial up internet, having it disconnect all the time, even with a dedicated phoneline was painfull.

I don't miss forced activities, there were some that I simply did not enjoy!

The issue with pure HTML blogging is that its major friction. First you have to write the blog post in word, then make a html page, then format it, copying over all the paragraphs into p tags and b tags and uploading images etc etc. I'm sure there are better ways of doing it, but Iv not found them yet! On top of that pure HTML blogs miss out on easy features like tagging which I think is actually a very important part of a blog, particularly if it covers many topics.

My happy place has been writing in markdown and running a script that converts into HTML

I love a tidily organised project folder

For most projects I have a basic structure like this:

Code

project/
/css/
/img/
/js/
index.html

Then add to it as the project needs...

My current structure for flamedfury.com looks like this, fairly standard structure for an 11ty project.

Code

flamedfury.com/
|-- _data
|-- _includes
| |--layouts
| |--partials
|-- _generate
|-- css
|-- guides
|-- img
| |--buttons
| |--badges
|-- fonts
|-- about
|-- updates
|-- js
|index.md

Interesting seeing how everyone else organises their projects

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?

Over the decades I've always had a homepage/website of some sort on the go. I cannot recall the initial inspiration. It may have been the small homepages that others on the local IRC server I first jumped on had for themselves. That took me through the process of setting up a page on my ISP's server (ISP's used to provide users small amounts of diskspace to host homepages!) and then Geocities.

I then got right into it and subscribed to local Netguide magazines that were published (physically) monthly and contained various tutorials about how to do various things on the net. I also got stuck in and did any type of class at school that involved computers. One of them we learned how to create a homepage, I ended up helping classmates as I was already well versed in what HTML was at the time

Whenever I get into a new hobby or Interest, in most cases I usually end up creating a website/homepage around it.


What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?

For me, the biggest challenge has always been the graphical aspect. I've always been great at having the vision of what I want, but I was always challenged by bringing that vision to life in pixels on the screen.

Luckily I've always mostly had friends and contacts who were very skilled in graphic design who were able to help me.

This continues to be a challenge for me to this day.


Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?

So, this has been one of my biggest regrets over the decades where I've not properly preserved my websites/homepages. Recently I've been proactive in either building sites statically, or converting them to static sites when I'm done with them to preserve them for years to come.

I've managed to recover a number of old versions of my biggest project and will eventually get around to restoring them into static versions to host as a museum of types to what they used to be.

Very envious of how Bytemoth has managed to do this for himself



That's most of my story anyway, have really enjoyed reading everybody else's story too!

I’ve also thought that would be a really cool ad network of old replacement @m15o.

Back when I moved off of the free hosting services onto shared hosting services provided by hobbyist website networks, they funded the hosting by requiring each site on the hosting network to display a simple banner at the top of the page. The ads were simple banners for CNet and other sites of the time. The main one I remember was Neoplanet (which was a skin over IE)

One that I was part of shared ad revenue with the hostees and I made a fair amount of pocket money off of that!

These days I don’t see ads, don’t really see how they line up with my current values in personal web pages.

I also don’t like the entire economy of food blogs that sprung up, not to share awesome food related content, but to build websites around adverts! I become very disillusioned in the blog community as a result of this.

Kia ora! I’m fLaMEd, most of you will know me from either my homepage or the Yesterweb discord.

I’m big on everyone having their own homepage and owning their data and not pouring their lives into walled garden platforms.

Bit late to the party here, but glad I’m here now!

Keep on creating!