Blast from the Past
I found my first blog, which led to the second. The layout was hand-drawn on middle school math exam scratch paper and made using a cracked copy of Photoshop 8. They're hosted on...imagebucket or something similar? All gone now, but the texts and posts are still there almost two decades later. With all the links to the bloggers in my year, all of them looking wildly different. To know how to style your pages was cool.
I remember learning HTML by checking the page sources of all the cool websites I landed on. I ended up taking the base structure from my favorite fansite, fudging with the tables and replacing all the image buttons for hours after school. Tables! It seemed so easy then, so transparent, as long as the website didn't use Flash. Near the end of middle school I was introduced to CSS and XML, but they made little sense to me compared to the naked straightforwardness of raw HTML even if nested tables drove you crazy every single time.
Despite not understanding half of the contents, I saved pages of Smashing Magazine whenever I dropped by the internet cafe in 256mb USB sticks to read offline (I didn't have an internet connection at home, and reading at the cafe ate precious, metered time). I spent a lot of time on MakeUseOf too, and participated enough to get two fun shirts I still use to this day (not for long, they're noticeably holey now at 16 years old). My home address was nonsense, deep in the labyrinthine passages of small roads though never quite the slums, so the arrival of these packages caused huge uproars in my father's workplace. Packages from America, imagine! (later on, Britain, as I won some stuff off Young Poets Network)
My dad was proud even when I told him it was just some kind of "best comment" prizes. My dad's bosses were not amused. They took it as a sign I was going to pursue education overseas, a highly uncouth thing for a mere shopkeeper's kid to dream of according to them. Mind your station!
I digress.
I think at one point web technology went from something some bored teenagers could persist through in an afternoon to something even seasoned engineers made fun of. Nah, I have no doubt teenagers could persist through today's landscape too, I've seen some high schoolers in the indie web doing things my middle school self would swoon over, but for many the internet has become such a bizarre place.
On one hand, we have this wealth of information and accessible platforms, but most platforms would rather you build sophisticated nonsense with their tools without even knowing how the innards work. Leave them, and you're left with zero idea how to replicate the magic. If you do want to learn though, boy is it easier than ever. Or not. Genuinely helpful pages seem to be constantly buried under seven layers of SEO nonsense and ads and AI summaries, even when they technically exist.
It could just be me getting old.
Anyway, the precursor of this blog was the third and the longest-running one. This is the fourth blog. Hopefully it will last a while.