Oops, I did it again

I’ve built up and torn down half a dozen blogs in the past twenty years. Some of those, like Contrarian Computing and Old Game Plus, focused on a narrow range of topics, more often than not serving up nostalgic reminiscences of old video games and other outmoded tech. Others, like Sandboxskiff, were personal blogs hosting vacation photos, anecdotes and the occasional diatribe. I found all of them frustrating to maintain, for a variety of reasons. Some were all built on top of heavy-weight web apps like Wordpress that were costly or annoying to deploy and required frequent maintenance to patch vulnerabilities. Even on static sites, convoluted templates required tweaks to maintain legibility in desktop and mobile contexts. Beyond the technical issues, I never felt that they were suitable vessels for the sort of content I share. My joking asides and philosophical musings felt out-of-place on tech-focused sites and my source code and schematics were too technical for my personal blogs.

The Merits of GeoCities

Now, as you’ve doubtless noticed, I’ve gone and created yet another blog, one that I believe will address these issues and, hopefully, endure far longer than my earlier attempts. What makes me confident that things will work out this time? Well, it occurred to me that I never suffered these frustrations with the hand-coded sites I threw up (and, indeed, they did look a bit vomit-y) on AOL, GeoCities and the like back in the 90s. The ‘anything goes’ approach evident in website design in that era extended to the content with many personal sites being a melange of bad jokes, MIDI files, DIY projects gone wrong and, of course, links to other interesting domains. These sites were unprofessional at best and often embarrassing and unnavigable, but they were undeniably human artifacts. They bore the marks of their authors, whose personalities shone brilliantly through florescent paragraphs and scrolling marquees. I honestly believe that the average, clumsily assembled GeoCities site did a better job of projecting its author’s humanity through the cold, vast Internet than any Instagram profile or other overly-curated social media presence I’ve come across.

A Realization

I came to this realization while doing research for a project to resuscitate an iMac G3 with standard PC parts. The first hit Google returned for my query was, surprisingly, not from iFixit or some subreddit, but a personal website on a DDNS.net subdomain. Dynamic DNS, or DDNS for short, is a service provided by NO-IP.com that essentially allows you to use your existing residential Internet connection to host sites out of your bedroom. It would seem that this relic of a bygone era has been resurrected to enable privacy-conscious nerds to access their personal cloud on the road. My interest was piqued so I clicked through to Eric Bylenga’s site to have a look around. I was not disappointed. All the information I was looking for was there and the layout was refreshingly unfashionable. But what really grabbed me was this endearing personal aside plopped down amidst all of the technical information:

One of Kristen’s requirements for this project is “It has to look good or we’re not using it”. Honestly babe, I’m doing my best here.

— Eric Bylenga

These words, in this technical context, on this handmade website, transformed Eric Bylenga from yet another name on the Internet to a real human being, someone I could get a beer with. When did the Internet stop being like this? ::cough:: Facebook ::cough:: Could it be like this again?

And Here We Are

There was nothing keeping my from slapping together a site of my own and dropping it on an old single-board computer on my desk so, as soon as a I had a free afternoon, I did. And here we are. Will nostalgia for GeoCities actually lead myself and others back to being present on the Internet rather than merely having a web presence? We shall have to see together. If what I’ve written here resonates with you, drop me a line, and maybe we’ll start a webring ;)

Post-script

You can browse old GeoCities sites and many more besides at The Old Net. As of February 1st, 2021, Eric Bylenga and I have yet to get a beer.