At the beginning of the year, I wanted to scrub myself off entirely from the internet and do the whole social media detox. It has been difficult considering I love consuming media and a big fraction of the people I follow are friends who create and are heavily involved in markets and events. It would be hard to keep up with these things if I completely detached myself from what keeps me intertwined with them. In all honesty, it is also that it would drive me into insane FOMO. So clearly, I didn’t try hard enough.
I did grow tired of being online - specifically on the platforms that I use, which is why I removed all personal content from these spaces besides the fact that I worry about oversharing/sharing a lot of personal details, but perhaps that might change during this process.
The idea of getting off social media sent me in the opposite direction.
But instead of giving myself a break from being online too much, I have spent so much time surfing the web endlessly in different corners of the internet in a more engaging/research way. I have been trying to reach the feeling of when I used to be online as a kid staying up all night playing on my computer. Though the internet is not the same as it once was there is still SO MUCH in here. This sparked something inside of me. It has everything I want to do and the ideas inside my head are starting to make sense. All I had to do was start and well… learn HOW to do it.
From all the research and reading I have been doing while spending time here, I have found so many people making their own websites now more known as ‘indie web’ or ‘handmade web’.
“I evoke the term 'handmade web' to suggest slowness and smallness as a form of resistance.
In today's highly commercialised web of multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search algorithms, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects.
The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways”.
- J. R. Carpenter, March 2015.
It is also made of people who miss the old internet and feel like the new internet lacks personality and creativity. But it’s more than just that - it’s to share bits and pieces of yourself with the world and people online in hopes you might just relate.
The fun web still exists; you just have to dig a little deeper to find it.
Where did I start?
I would suggest looking into: neocities. I won’t even try to recall how I found neocities, but I suspect it was when I was looking for websites similar to GeoCities (only accessible by The Wayback Machine).
Looking through so many websites on there gave me so many ideas and inspired me to make my own website. I decided that I was going to learn from scratch. I gave in and I bought my own domain (outside of neocities) and everything that needed to be done to have it working properly. I am still very new at this, but I decided that this would be my personal project and goal this year and also I sort of knew what I was getting myself into thanks to old Myspace and Tumblr because it was so serious to have a really decked out profile. I won’t say this time is any more serious than then, but now I have more of a purpose and a drive for it since it is all personally mine. I figured if I am already spending so much time on social media, maybe I’ll at least do something out of it.
I’ve always loved being on the computer. I’ve always loved being online, so why leave?
What did I use?
- Neocities, of course!
Lurking through sites. You can also look into people’s code to get an idea of how everything works and interacts. Just be aware to not steal code by copy and pasting the whole entire thing.
- VS Code
This is the program I use to write and save all code.
Website used to learn the basics.
- FreeCodeCamp (Responsive Web Design)
Another website I use to learn basics, except here it’s an actual course where you’ll have various exercises.
This is how the website was born.
an intense or overpowering longing, desire, or need; craving.
A tender or urgent longing.
Deep longing, especially when accompanied by tenderness or sadness.
A strong feeling of wishing for something, especially something that you cannot have or get easily.
The name I gave this website felt fitting when I chose it. I wanted it to have some intention behind it - in a time where I miss the internet I grew up with and how a lot of webpages have ceased to exist, I believe that now more than ever there is a need to keep making personal websites for the sake of archiving, collecting, hobbies, interests, ideas, and life. I’ve had an intense longing, desire, a craving to create and share with you something I have made on my own from the ground up. I have many ideas where I want to go with this project but in the meantime, this is all I have. A foundation to start with!
Today I offer you: yearning.online and tomorrow? Who knows?
Disclaimer: I apologize in advance if the website is ever broken, after all, I am just learning.
But I hope you stick around <3
“…look at you”
This is so exciting! I need to learn some coding for a project. I’m excited about the project but not the process so I’m dragging my feet.