What inspired you to create a personal website?

[basophie]

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

for me, i wanted somewhere to share my art with people and a way to store it if i ever wanna look back on it but social media gives me PANIC like full blown anxiety attacks whenever i post, so having a personal website was kind of away to push myself to share my creations with the world but on a more controlled space that i can assure no haters are gonna cross me randomly and where i don't need to worry about following guidelines or posting whenever or whatever for algorithms and i can let myself just vibe! i also found on the process that i really enjoy web-crafting and CSS and making sites look pretty!

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

CONSISTENCY WITH MYSELF. i am not a consistent person! im the type of guy who will spends 6 days in a row sitting on my computer pouring myself into a hobby and then miss a day and not do it again ITS A STRUGGLE!! but ive been trying to space out myself and reassure myself that im in control of my own space and that there is no need to rush anything. theres also anxiety of what if people just are mean to me or whatever? that comes with existing XD

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?

this is a hard oneeeee but i hope i have a lot more content and pages finished and that i have a bunch of art and writing done just piling and piling there for people to read LOL ! i wanna pour myself out into the woooordl!!!!!!!!

[Capybara]

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?
  What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?
  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?

1. I made sites on Geocities and Freewebs when I was a teenager, they just didn't last. Then when social media kicked in, I was in company with less people who had personal sites unless they were professional or portfolios. Then the enshittification kicked in for the later half of the 2010s. I found some Neocities sites in 2022, and some inspired me to follow suit so I started tinkering after work. Then when DeviantART introduced AI on their site, it was my last straw and I decided to set up shop for real as my digital house.

2. Coding issues, and generally posting things without thinking. I also was stuck in Neopets code standards and almost refused to update to "modern" methods like external CSS for years until I realized how difficult it is to go without it.

3. My site will turn three in the fall. In two more years, I hope to buy a domain, and maybe even move hosts. But I have no plans to leave Neocities.

[CoolKid575]

I wasn't alive / online during the early 2000s; but I've always loved how authentic personal websites are, especially the ones coded from scratch. It's just so exciting to have a virtual place that I can say I made and that I can do whatever I want with. As for challenges, the main challenge is keeping everything updated properly; it's a pure HTML blog with virtually no formatting, so the coding itself is very easy and I can mostly copy / paste and just change the text for each article; but it's easy to make mistakes when linking to it from other parts of the site, and sometimes I accidentally forget to add new stuff to the "All" page and / or forget to refresh the "Last Updated" date on the main page. 5 years from now, I imagine it's still essentially going to look the same, just with a lot more content as I finish more books / TV shows / movies etc and add more articles.

[Yoylecake420]

There was a Tumblr thread that showed links to Indieweb sites like Neocities. I have sinced join the personal web and made both a Neocities and Nekoweb website.

[cmdr_nova]

What inspired me to make and maintain a website?

At first, it was just because I wanted a place to write, that was larger than a snippet of a post on Twitter. But I think I shut it down, and put it away over and over again ... until the beginning of last year. I had a Wordpress site, but I was sort of missing being able to fully edit everything, with my bare hands. And then big tech and billionaires accelerated their process of making everything terrible, much worse, and began invading our privacy in ways nobody could have ever imagined they would: Through algorithmic theft that scrapes the entire internet.

Of course, Twitter is bad, Threads is run by a jerk with no morals, and Bluesky is just a corporate-backed Twitter clone that's pretending to be open source. And, while I do love Mastodon, I've come to the realization that the best thing you can do for yourself, especially in times of authoritarian techno-fascism, is to have your own website. Keep it on your hdd, back it up, update it, maintain it, write on it. And even if the US government forces all personal websites offline ... for some reason, you still have it. You can put it up on frikken ... TOR if you want.

That's the beauty of making and owning your own site. It cannot be destroyed.

... you know, as long as you take proper precautions