30.09.2026

Website building feels more fun

So, for the past two or three days, I was indirectly motivated by a friend to come back to this ... project thing I started in 2023 and make it functional. Y'know, have some use. The reason I didn't care during all those years was not because I was busy (Infact I had a lot of free time then) but because HTML and CSS is frustating to do. I picked this up back in highschool when our computer science teacher tried to teach us HTML and CSS. Nothing came of use in that class - he gave up and we spent the rest of the year playing games on the computers in the lab. The syllabus wasn't compulsory. I was really interested though, so I wanted to teach myself.

I had high hopes at first, y'know. Ooh, imagine, i could set up my art portfolio! I could host web games, I could create puzzles, I could do a lot of exciting things! I created an account on Neocities and cracked my knuckles as I read through the HTML tutorial from Penelope, the web host's mascot. Then, I hopped on to index.html. Oh boy, oh boy!

I set a heading, some paragraphs, and maybe one or two lists for good measure. Yahoo! All done! I clicked on 'View', and...

I wasn't sure what i was expecting. It looked like how you'd expect it. But I was.. very sad. Disappointed. Is this it? I thought to myself. It looked ugly to me. Plain white background, everything sticking to the sides of the screen, combined with the ugly Times New Roman font.

So I had little choice but to continue with learning CSS. CSS is certainly worse than HTML, you have to constantly look up what you can and cannot change, what were the attribute names, what exactly does margin, border and padding mean. Sometimes when you make an error, the script edit window doesn't let you know, cuz you didn't make any syntax errors, But there is certainly something wrong, because you write around 2 to 3 blocks of code, save it, then click 'view website'... You don't see any change. That's just the thing, unlike programming languages like Python, you don't see the cause of error right away. No, sir, you have to scrutinize and check and verify every line of code to see where you went wrong.

This is extremely frustating. You go through all that effort to copy paste that code snippet from another website or from w3schools, and there's no change! why wont it change! As a young sensitive fellow who could not control my anger, and also just a very unwise impatient freshman, naturally, I did the one thing teenagers do when they realize they aren't automatically good at something new. I gave up.

and I didn't revisit for 3 more years. Neocities tells me I did do something in 2024 and 2025, but these must've been minor changes, or redaction of embarrassing information. I don't know, those 2 years were very messy in my life, I don't remember. When I logged back in in 2026, I saw the header say "world of jakecake" (probably my embarrassing screenname that i forgot to redact). Encased in a well padded dashed pink border against a background color of sky blue.

You must understand, that by 2026, most of social media was already enshittified. A great chunk of the userbase was occupied by bots, making engagement bait posts for money, on Twitter. You could no longer tell the difference between an AI generated video and a real one on Instagram. Android apps for popular social media apps were unoptimized taking up battery and data like crazy. I could go on forever, this was an extremely depressing phenomenon, the "Dead Internet Theory". Even the Internet "third space" was becoming more and more restricted with age verification and paywalls than real life third spaces.

This motivated me more than anything to start building my own website. Now it didn't matter anymore, I had plenty of time, better patience, and more WILLINGNESS for learning CSS.

with this newfound energy, I wiped the two files index.html and style.css and worked from scratch. I consulted tutorials, and used layout builders, while using the Inspect command on every website to understand how each element was placed and designed. it became.. more fun!! Granted, there were some frustating moments too (css requires you to memorize a lot of attributes still) but I felt a different special tingly feeling at knowing that I was learning and doing it all by myself, without the assistance of some generative AI chatbot. With my own hard work, I figured out how div worked, how span worked, how CSS utilizes attributes, and so on. It felt like i was learning how to draw. Just like how an artist starts drawing shapes and moving to learning perspective, I slowly learned HTML tags and objects and moved on to CSS to beautify or place these elements in the right place.

The indie web should still exist, as an outlet of joy and creativity for the still-human netizens. Being able to make my own website has brought me lots of joy.

Let the movement of decentralized web content live on in triumph!

Jake