Hello World!

Motivations

I've recently been getting into early-internet stuff. This has been in the back of my mind for a while, but the serious enshittification of the web and social media has made me genuinely use it less: YouTube's aggressive anti-adblock policy, Twitter's bot invasion, and Google search's AI spam.

Even though I was born well after the web and internet became mainstream, I began using it when I was very young. When websites still had 800px fixed-width tables containing all of its content. In fact, my internet speed didn't surpass 1.5Mbps until 2015. All of this makes me feel very closely related to the old net, and I miss it. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but oh well, it's worth a try.

On top of that, I have been thinking of getting into writing, but I am probably the worlds worst head-thoughts-into-words-maker in the world. So hopefully writing my completely baseless opinions and feelings here will help with that.

What I wanted to make

The Wikipedia page that sparked this rabbit hole was about the Gopher protocol. If you're reading this on Gopher, hi! If not, just look at the Wikipedia page. I installed OverbiteNX and browsed some Gopherholes and it really excited me. There's lots of interesting stuff out there. The only downside is that it's not got much content. In a way though, it adds to the charm. Almost everyone on there has a blog (or "phlog") so I wouldn't feel too weird adding my own.

I had a look at Gemini too, but honestly, I don't really like it. It's a good idea, but personally I find the restrictions to be too heavy. Only three headings? No nested lists? That feels like adding a restriction for the sake of it. The rest of it, I quite like. Please make your own opinion on this one. As with everything.

Early WWW! Not too early, though. I'm talking roughly 1995-1999, before HTML 4. I really love the aesthetic of these websites. It's so refreshing seeing people actually be self-expressive with their website, instead of having something like: black background, centred h1 My Full Name, css3 animation stolen from stackoverflow, 5MB javascript library for some text animation. I love it.

Finally, let's not forget probably the most widely used blog format: RSS. This came out during the whole XML craze, so it's pretty dated now. But I think it's worth supporting, especially given that support is actually still quite widespread despite the lack of real usage. There's also Atom, and more recently JSONFeed. I absolutely love JSONFeed. It's exactly how I would've ended up making the core feed if I didn't end up finding it.

Implementation

Okay, this is pretty long now, so let's speed it up. My website previously ran static content only, using nginx. Now, I've reimplemented both my website, as well as the new gopher server in NodeJS. I am using a slightly dodgy self-made fork of gopher-server and Express w/ EJS for the web side. I'm using JSONFeed as the main feed from which all the other sources are derived. Overall, I'm very happy with it.

What is this blog, then?

I think it will be a mix of project writeups, interesting optimisation stuff, and occasional rants about the state of the internet. It's not going to be particularly personal about my life, mainly because that is basically 25% of what my life amounts to. The other 75% includes sleeping, my cat, and yearning.

Until the next post, thanks for reading! I have a few good ideas on what to talk about. Byebye! :3