I really couldn’t resist linking to a post about links.

We make links. Links make the web. The web makes Us.

<3

And, shameless plug, if you like links, especially lists of links, check out my new-tab-page browser extension, A Fine Start.

I have been using this library for years, and it’s only gotten better over time. For whatever reason, I’ve always found it easier to grok than GSAP. I’ve used it for DOM animations, but where I’ve had the most fun with it lately is using it with PixiJS to animate 2D games.

The AnimeJS homepage is absolutely stunning.

Adam Newbold of omg.lol, blogging at Neatnik:

The key aspects of Hardcore IndieWeb are control over your content and portability of your website:

• If your content doesn’t primarily exist on your own hard drive, you don’t fully control your content.
• If you don’t have a copy of your published HTML and web assets on your own hard drive, it’s not truly portable.

If this position sounds a bit hardcore, it is, but that’s the kind of person this guide was made for. It’s worth mentioning that the principles are hardcore, not the skills needed—in many ways, the instructions Adam lays out here are even easier than other methods of creating a website.

The process looks like this:

• Author your web content on your hard drive.
• Preview it in your web browser.
• When you’re happy with what you have, upload it to your web host. Repeat as often as you’d like.

That’s it. It really is that simple.

The rest of this guide walks you through this process in more detail. It celebrates being close to the actual code of your website as opposed to layering on dozens of abstractions.

It’s a very similar ethos to HTML for People (and indeed, he links out to it several times), but with a focus on ensuring control of your data at every point in the process.

My own website follows most of these principles, except I am using a static site generator, at the time of this writing, and a somewhat complex templating system. But most of my website is previewable locally, lives in a repository, and gets deployed to my server at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. I say “most of my website” because, at this point, my website has become its own organism with various sub-pages and things that aren’t tracked in the main project. The website as it lives on my server is the only complete representation of the website, but I do weekly backups just in case.

I also immediately thought of my brother’s website. His website is a simple blog that he made with vanilla, handwritten PHP, including the RSS feed!

I enjoyed this guide, and even though I think it’s totally fine to use a blog service if that’s what works for you, it’s always good to remember that layers of services and tooling aren’t actually needed to make a website. A website is just a collection of files. When I learned this fact over 20 years ago, it was eye-opening for me, and it’s what immediately drew me in to making websites.

This quirky uppercased font appeared on my radar by way of the SimpleBits® Secret Club™ Slack chat.

Really love the vintage feel of this font, but the real super power it has is its extreme flexibility. It comes in four distinct styles with multiple weights and widths. There are so many ways you can mix and mash this font up to get a specific desired effect.

But the reason I’m sharing it is because of the whimsical, interactive micro site. Just incredible.

Michelle Barker’s post is relatable to a personal homepage enthusiast like myself.

Building a website feels old-fashioned these days. How many more websites do I have left in me before the old fire flickers and dies? Is snuffed out. Before making websites is no longer a viable way to earn a living? The web will change drastically within my lifetime, maybe someday soon, indeed it already has. Maybe it really will fizzle out, a graveyard haunted only by bots and crawlers. But I have a hunch that there will be a long tail. Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads. Making fun websites, helpful websites, pointless websites (the best kind) that serve no purpose other than to manifest someone’s spark of creativity.

It’s hard for me to imagine the fire ever snuffing out. My sites have never been hugely popular and I’ve never had a large audience except for blips and spikes here and there. But that’s not why I have a website. I make blakewatson.com for myself. I do it so I can copy a link and send it to a friend. I do it as a record of my thoughts and passions. I cherish the small amount of visitors I do have and the occasional email I receive about something I wrote. The long tail is real. There are real humans out there who just want to enjoy each other’s websites.