Why this page? ✍️
- Notes to self.
- Clarify and formalize thoughts.
- Practice concistency.
- Test new technology live (as oposed to localhost).
- Meet other curious people.
- Put (another) dent in the universe.
- Store some content in a safe place that are 100% in my control.
- Store some content for the long run.
- I would like to contribute to the web I once knew. The open, the wierd, the self contained, the non-commercial, the personal web full of home pages and ‘under construction’ gifs.
Why I think you should have a page like this
Many years ago, I noticed a pattern among the people I admire around the internet. These guys could be coders, writers, travellers or completely random profiles. Famous and non-famous. I observered that many of them had these simple and old looking personal webpages and blogs. The reason for this style seemed to be the urge of simplicity, to be in control and also the cheer joy of creating the best tool for the job. I also saw that many of them rewrote their sites multiple times to test out different technology. It inspired me to do the same. And now, I challenging you to throw youself out there, and create your own site. It’s easy to just click ‘Install now’ on a Wordpress template, but what exactly do you learn from that? Normally I would share the source code for a project for this, but not this time: I wan’t you to create it yourself. From scratch. Well, not really from scratch but almost. Start by finding a SSG (Static Site Generator), and pick one that looks interesting. I’ve used Hugo to build this site. Previously, I’ve also written this exact same page using Jekyll, Ruby on Rails, GatsbyJS and BridgetownRB. At this point, I would recommend Hugo.
My internet story
My story on the internet started in 1996. I was thirteen and made my first webpage. I did that using Microsoft Frontpage Express and uploaded my beautiful typed index.html to a FTP-server. I don’t remember much of the content, but I can remember a manipulated JPG with Michael Jackson and myself. The hosting provider was called SOL (Scandinavia Online), and it was Norway’s AOL equivalent. When I understood that it was actually out there, I was amazed. Still am. Even though it’s been almost thirty years, I find it remarkable that it’s still html, css and javascript. Everything else has changed, but the building blocks are the same.
A new era of web-interest started for around 2010. I was re-introduced to programing, with headliners like DHH, Jason Fried, Sam Stephensson, Paul Graham, the Collison-brothers (Stripe), Ryan Bates, Gregg Pollack and others ruling indie hacker scene at the time.