Doing More With What You Already Have

I’ve just posted the first post on The Underground for the New Year; you’ll need to be subscribed to the RSS feed to read the full thing, but I wanted to share my favourite part of the post here, for posterity:

An aside: I hesitate to air the nostalgia reason; a lot of the current resurgence of the small/indie/open web is driven by a nostalgia for what we had before, and ultimately I’d like us collectively to move past that nostalgia and start imagining new ways of using the web on a personal level.

But. But but but.

I can’t deny there is an element of nostalgia driving this desire to do more with my own website. Way, way, way back… back before we standardised on blogs, I had a website and it was a melting pot of everything I was interested in; it was a miniature “hub” online for me and my “IRL” friends (one of several hubs we used, all run by someone we knew in person). There was a feature where people could leave messages for each other. Meetups were arranged in the comments. If I decided I wanted to experiment with using maths to drive Adobe Flash animations, well I guess now there’s a new gallery page for that. Photo dumps of nights out before we started using Facebook for that purpose - before Facebook existed, even! Reviews of local band gigs that were as much about promoting those bands and venues as anything else, because I was in love with that world and wanted to share it… in short: anything I could think about putting online I experimented with doing so. Some of it didn’t work and got pulled down again quickly, and most of it would almost certainly make me cringe now - but isn’t that part of the point of being young? To embarrass your older self with how carefree you were?

Now, I accept the world and I are very different in 2024 to how we were in 1999-2002, so it will never be exactly the same. But the ethos still clings to me. I still believe - even if my aging memory needs reminded and pushed into action - that our websites could and should be a reflection of everything we want to share about ourselves. Your website could be your central hub on the web, instead of one part in a network of profiles across dozens of sites. It could be something so deeply you, that even though you post prolifically in many places, it’s your website people remember about and read first.