The web in the 90s was weird.
There weren’t any social networks (in the conventional sense). There weren’t even any blogs yet. And search engines were non-existent or terribly bad.
But there were websites. Many, many glorious websites!
Personal websites of that era were fantastic mashups of people’s various interests and hobbies. While today most websites feel very homogenous and singularly focused, back then visiting someone’s site felt like walking into their home.
A year or so ago, I tried to incorporate more of that into Go Make Things.
But it felt really out-of-place and uncomfortable on a site that was so heavily focused on web development, so I quickly tore it out.
But the allure and pull of having a weird 90s era website persisted. And so a week or two ago, I dusted off ChrisFerdinandi.com (which has for years just directed to Go Make Things), and spun up a personal site.
A lot of folks in the Indie Web space refer to this a digital garden.
While I like the idea in concept, the idea of an entire-website-as-a-wiki always felt too limiting, too rigid for me. But then I stumbled onto Tom Critchlow’s article on Streams, Campfires, and Gardens, and something clicked.
My personal site isn’t just a digital garden.
It’s home to random thoughts and cool stuff I find, some more evergreen guides that do fit the digital garden format, a whole section on TTRPGs and my D&D character, a running log of my RV travels, and a way for me to track how I change as a person over time.
Oh, and I even worked in an old Geocities under construction GIF for the pages I’m still building out (courtesy of GIFcities)…
I’m not going to lie: I feel a lot more vulnerable and exposed doing this in 2024 than I did in the 90s.
Part of that is probably my age and the self-preservation instinct that comes from being a proper adult. But the web is also a vastly bigger place than it was in the 90s, and that’s both exciting and scary.
But for all of my complaining about what the web has become, I thought it was important to put my money where my mouth is and start building the kind of web I’d like to see more of.
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