Why Own a Website
Note: This post is subject to errors (grammatical or more) as i’m writing this to give a try at writing something in one go and at 3:00 AM. Pardon any errors!
Back in 2020, when I had got started living more on the internet and with virtual friends. I always had a weird attraction towards cool, minimal and very worn out websites which were very old (I still like finding such websites). I always wanted to make my own website too.
It was all my curiosity and attraction towards building and having my own website. I tried learning a bit of HTML, and CSS hand in hand with a bit of javascript (which I never implemented in Web Development), I built my first website by copying and modifying the code from the first version of bugswriter.com which was a very nerdy and geeky implementation of Neofetch but with my photograph and my details instead of system details. Ngl, it was very fun doing all this back then. After that I slowly started learning more and more, there was almost no one to tell but only the internet to look upon for inspiration.
One thing at that time being a kid of 15s did not know was how to do the right search query. A couple of my friends on telegram had been redirecting me to google.com every time I tried to ask them something. And that’s how I slowly started moving to google.com until it was a huge fuck up I created.
I almost switched between 10-15 different styles of web pages I build over the course of the last 3 years of my existence as a internet boy. Sometimes, I look up to geeky folks websites, I used to make mine like that getting inspired and sometimes I used to see these cool creative UX developers websites and I used to try building a beautiful, elegant and creative (not so creative in my case) websites. https://mangeshre.github.io turned out to be one of them. (please do not open, its fucked up)
Why should you have your own website ?
Over the time of these 3 years, one thing I have noticed is that this land of Internet is open for most people to criticize, share their opinions in whatever way they want (until its legal according to the govt and digital laws).
You learn a lot around tech and generally get the idea of how these HTTP, HTTPS, DNS protocols work in general without going very deep into their fundamentals (if you wish not to) which is very good if you’re already willing to become a developer. Overtime you stumble upon a lot of different things, like how I stumbled upon. HTML, CSS, a bit of JS, then to CSS Frameworks, and after that Javascript Front End Frameworks like React, SolidJS etc, and now I prefer being happy with a simple and nice static site generator.
Majorly because I just want to learn sharing my honest opinions and POV’s on the internet in the form of blogs. Which is also helping me learn how to write and actually make sense.
Isn’t it cool to have your own website hosted on some nice and cheap domain with some hosting service like GIthub Pages, Vercel or even maybe try self hosting it ? Back then I did not know what self hosting meant. But again over time, I came to know about it and now the next thing I want to do is self host my website on a dedicated $5 droplet or something. I actually have more interest in self hosting my website on a physical hardware instead of these cloud services which are kind of charging more because I can save money by hosting it on my old crappy craptop.
Developing common sense: Keeping yourself up to date about what goes on the internet, I feel is very important as we’re bound by Internet at every moment of our life in this era. Thankfully, because of people and geeks like Aaron Swartz there’s a lot / enough amount of Freely accessible information is available on the internet. If you’re someone who want to read old things from the old times then OpenLibrary.org or even internetarchive.org / archive.org are the best places.
I see myself transitioning from surfing youtube to surfing Wayback machine sometimes (sometimes is good).