I'm Beginning Web Development... Again.
An Example of My Dream Website:
(Okay, not really)
A long-standing dream of mine is to make a website and I've often tried to fudge a few into existence over the years. Why? That's a question I recently had to ask myself. While I was living out of my backpack in Japan, I was blessed with the wonders of unlimited uncensored internet!
Finally! I thought, 1N73RN37 B00B13Z W/0U7 @ VPN! I can access my email and media without a VPN!"
Redirects to Japanese versions of websites "hit" a little differently than those made elsewhere. Actually, the Japanese internet reminded of Web 1.0 in many ways. Although I only took cursory glances since I can only read Japanese the same way I read Chinese, My brain was laden with memories of Ask Jeeves, Neopets, Runescape, GameFAQS... and so on. You'd have to have been there to know why it was good.
I also did another thing which I typically try to forbid myself from when I travel - I spent the night in my hotel hooked on the internet. And I was hooked on really stupid things. Mainly, the social media apps I cannot use back home: Instagram posts of exotic vacations, flame-wars on Reddit over literally nothing important, memes on Discord from boards I never use. At the end of it, I could really feel the brain-rot kicking in. The dopamine hits of fantasy and negativity just felt incredibly hollow. Looking back on the Instagram posts, I'd been to a lot of the places where those models trotted around in their bikinis, or "brave photographers" plunged themselves... and I remembered just how ordinary a lot of it was - despite being advertised as extraordinary. Don't get me started on the ads. I felt tired. I felt like I wasted a night in Japan - a place I really wanted to be for many years.
Punishing my sleep deprived self a little longer, I found a YouTube tutorial on "The Indie Web," which was a bit ironic, but his was the only one. Like a glitch in the matrix, I watched a YouTube video about quitting YouTube (Now I get a lot of videos telling me my life will be perfect if I start a YT channel. It's too late - I've seen everything!). I learned that RSS feeds are still a thing, and there are interesting people out there, doing and thinking interesting things, and not trying to be a big monetized star on controversial media platforms. I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to learn more. I also wanted to get my dopamine hit and not contribute to the big-tech algorithms or AI models that use more electricity than some countries. I figure if you are reading this blog you already know what that entails.
I Did What Any Sane Individual Would Do
I impulse-bought an Angela Yu class on web development because it was on sale... Digital minimalism is still something I'm working on, and also actual minimalism, which I've written about before. I'm not a big fan of how Dr. Yu's coursework has been (openly) bought, shipped, sold, and advocated for by Google and its services, but I do like her way of approaching subjects. I learned a lot from her Python course, so I'm all strapped in for full stack development! Woo!
I also did something slightly more productive - I actually started using sites like marginalia to follow real people writing real things. And this is where the net got interesting again for me. I deleted a lot of social media accounts (which I had to do anyway - I'll write about that sometime in the future). I got my RSS reader ready, and I bargained with myself that, if I was going to relax on the web at night, it wasn't going to be by contributing to something I consider to be a global problem. I reckoned I could either read from people I started following, or start searching for more people. And I really love what I found! I'll make a web ring at some point (and a recipes page once I know how to make CSS for a recipe print-out).
What Does Web Development Have To Do With This?
Searching the "indie-net," or the non-centralized net, brought back that old dream of mine - but it also got me thinking in other ways too. For starters, nearly every website I've ever hacked together in the past was a joke website. These unsustainable sites that I couldn't maintain became a big waste of time and money. They often collected net-dust once they stopped working in China. Same when a bug I didn't like and couldn't fixed chewed my page to pieces. Also word-press is so laden with adds and costs! And I can never seem to unhook it from google fonts - thus being un-loadable for me.
On one hand, I want to bring life back into that creative-me, but with more purpose. Unlike Python, I really like to visually see something happen when I am working. Websites are fun when I know how I've broken them. Young me loved solving problems HTML. perfecting a neopets homepage making myspace play 30 songs at once Toying with and breaking things until I got that perfect page was wonderful. It's too bad I didn't know anyone who could help me learn how to put some of those experiments online (did you know that trees in Maine don't know anything about Domain Name Services?).
Tech Minimalism
I'm also toying with an interesting idea. Among other things, I'm very good at breaking computers. I'm often reinstalling software and backing up for the specific thing I broke. Although I think it's good to have some digital diversity, and there are ways to tackle that part, I like the idea of localized web-based applications. Going onto somebody's website to use a tool is great, but what if I don't have wifi but still need a tool? I got a Pi Zero W2 back home which served its purpose as hacking device and a paperweight - and I've wanted to take it out of retirement. Poor thing never lived up to its dreams of becoming a BBS server (another time mayhaps). I wonder if I can develop low-powered web-apps which will launch from the pi on my local network. Then I can keep my laptops as light as possible.
I've always cared a lot about how our move for beefier tech has caused a ton of needless environmental damage. Remember when Myspace and Facebook could run on a flip phone? Or when you could watch Netflix on your 3DS? Or When Google kept "Do No Evil" in their code of conduct? Remember when you didn't need to buy a new phone every year? Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but the human race landed on the moon with a machine less powerful than a Texas Instruments TI-84 calculator and that has to count for something.
I wonder if you could run Doom on Appolo 11's AGC?
This is Daruma, over and out.
(PS: If you like art, interesting people, and sustainable tech solutions, you should check out 100 rabbits. They are my favorite blog right now.)