To have a home on the internet

When I talked about my goals for 2026 in my last post, remaking my website from scratch was one of the goals I mentioned. Somehow I’ve already scratched that one off my list!

I spent most of my holiday break on it. My brother is a great programmer and he’s made a lot of websites. So with his help and a decent tutorial I had the first version of the site done in about 2 weeks. It would have taken way longer without him.

It’s a pretty basic, but it’s the way I like it. Here’s a list of reasons why I think it’s cool.

• I own all the code and content, so I can easily migrate to a different host if I don’t like their politics or pricing.
• I can update it easily by pushing changes via Github.
• It’s lightweight, easy to use and customise.
• Now I could put a browser game on there if I want.
• I can add the features I actually want to it myself (in the public and admin area).
• No prompts trying to make me use AI tools to make the layout or write instead of me.

These things were all impossible or lacklustre when I was using SquareSpace. Sure it’s easy to use but it felt clunky, limiting and I lowkey dreaded to open the editor.

It might seem like a frivolous thing to put effort into making a website in this day and age. Who even visits websites these days? Actually, I’m not sure… surfers?

So maybe I can only talk for myself; I find it sad when I discover an artist on social media and their art is buried in their feed among dozens of reaction gifs and their best thoughts are hidden among hundreds of short spur-of-the-moment thoughts.

I think it’s disrespectful to your own work to just let the social media feed consume your art like that and never make an effort to collect the pieces in one place where they become a whole family.

I see a website as a display case for the projects and art I’ve made. And as a digital garden for the ideas and thoughts I want to cultivate. Just because it doesn’t exist on a platform with billions of members doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.

If you care about what you make, why would you not care about making a home for it?

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published 2026-01-20