Welcome!

This is my Web Garden, a spruced-up take on the demo site I've been building for this HTML class. A website can be like a garden: you design it, plant it, cultivate good things, or sometimes leave it to overgrow. Other people can visit and enjoy it.

Hello! It's great to have you here.

Making your own website isn't just good because it teaches you how to code. It's also a small way you can reclaim your thoughts and ideas from the corporate, hyper-fast, poisonous web the Internet has become since sites like this went extinct. You can say what you want, free from the "algorithm" and its whims, and because it takes a little bit of work to post in raw HTML you'll also spend some time really thinking about what you're saying. Making a website is meditative.

About

A long time ago, the Internet was made of websites. Some of them were large and some of them were small, but all of them existed on the same level, more or less. Back then, the term "net" made a lot more sense: it felt like a network of nodes distributed roughly evenly across a huge space. You could explore this net ("surfing") at your own pace and always find new stuff to think about.

Today, the Internet is made out of apps, and the idea of exploration—especially between sites—is basically gone. The new internet is more of a web, where we are the spider: sitting in the middle, being fed data and content down radiating spokes, never moving but just hoping the computer serves up something good.

Photo: Marian Weyo

Basically I think this sucks. Decision paralysis and ground-down attention spans are the intentional products of an industry dedicated to making you watch the most stuff-per-minute in order to show you maximum ads, with no regard for whether the stuff is any good or whether you like it. By making and using small, handmade websites, you are reclaiming your human brain from the teeth of the machine.

People have become too conditioned to expect sleek, fully JavaScripted "Web Apps" instead of good old-fashioned pages. We need to return to tradition, in only this one specific instance and in no other area of life. Websites can and should be lightweight, simplistic, and wonky. Proof that a human made something is getting more and more important. Let the imperfections in your handwritten HTML show the world you care.

Links

This site is my demo build for the HTML class I was running on Discord. Several participants also finished and uploaded their class projects:

• Example link

Also, here are a few good reads about treating the web like a garden:

• You Should Have a Website by Nora Reed
• Neocities - Making the Web Fun Again
• We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon
• The Low-Tech Manifesto by synth-ruiner

Secret Bug Page

hell yeah