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Nikkiana: raw thoughts on money
The title from the linked entry above from Nikkiana's self-described "semi-public journal". A good way to describe it, to describe most of our niche sites, including my own, off in Geminispace. If it's on the internet, it's public. And yet we had this weird expectation of privacy. Sort of. If nobody sees what you're writing, it's private, thought of course this can change quickly.
Nikkiana wrote just over half a dozen entries in seven months. The one I've linked at the start of this gemlog is the penultimate, at least at time of writing. It's more than a year old; maybe she's given up, or run out of steam. I found it sad because it's rare that I come across a site that reminds me, really reminds me, of what we had before.
https://www.neocities.org/browse
I found her site the way I suspect a lot of neocities sites are found: via neocities' browse function. Periodically I go see if there's anything interesting. Go to the site, filter by tag: diary, journal, blog. I look for something that catches my eye. So many of the sites are dead, or garish, or both. I'm not interested in the pixie-puke Win95-ish sites covered with fifty buttons and webrings and little else. Her journal, when I found it, was none of those things. Black and white. It would have been minimal in 1997. It feels even more so now. It's perfect.
I learned the how of her process in her last entry: Jeckyll, static site generation. Like me, she's a former web developer. And Jeckyll and its ilk aren't my jam, but I get it. It's easy. Personally, I've never gone in for these. I'd rather make my sites myself. It keeps me in it if I'm responsible for everything, if I'm the webmaster rather than just the writer-of-stuff (not "content"; not that awful word). My tech recommendations change if it's a site for money, but for my own interest, I'd rather be making things.
in the beginning... there was an experiment.
It seems like Nikkiana and I came to personal websites similarly, probably in a very familiar way to teens of the mid-to-late 90s. Our friends were making websites, so we did, too. One of my first websites was in the TimesSquare neighbourhood in GeoCities. It was green on black. I'm pretty sure it had spinning skull gifs, though this may be wistful nostalgia. It was bad. I moved off it quickly, and began to more minimal sites elsewhere. I remember many URLs, but not that one. I wish I could check the Wayback to see if it existed.
I had various websites for at least a year, and probably two, before mc's old net.diary went through me like an electric shock and made me realize I wanted to write about my life, too. I wasn't nearly as interesting - not poly, not a hacker, not an anarchist - but who cares? I started writing down my days. I was new to this, and used real names. This eventually became a problem. I've talked about that elsewhere. I won't get into it here.
I wrote down my days for years, and then, gradually, I stopped. I'd given up, or run out of steam. In the intervening years, I saw the landscape change underneath me. The teenagers (mostly girls) I started writing with moved off handmade HTML journals and on to platforms. LiveJournal, Xanga, DiaryLand. We stopped writing websites: we began publishing entries, content, posts. Before it felt like we were tending homes and gardens on the frontier of the possible. The web was huge, but it was still personal. At the end we were drowned out by SEO experts, garbage-pushers who'd never made anything interesting or durable in their lives.
But mostly, I just laid dormant on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and later TikTok, watching other people post and feeling just a little sad and jealous that the world I came from was gone.
Same, same. More than a decade between my last entry, in 2011, and my start here, in alternative-protocol-land. A long silence. I stopped posting regularly on Facebook in the late 00s, limiting it to a blast of vacation photos once a year. I posted here and there on some forums, but I wasn't writing. I started a big software project early in the 2010s; it's ongoing to this day. But I wasn't writing. That would come later, getting back into poetry as a new year's resolution in 2015. Life-writing another seven years more.
So a note of thanks to Nikkiana, to she-who-will-never-read-this: her HTML journal kickstarted my own, a little later. After decades away from life writing, the personal, her "semi-public", I'm back, and it seems to be holding. Inspiration's a funny thing. In '97, '98 it came from mc's net.diary, then from my online friends' HTML journals. In Geminispace, it was a conversation with a mutual on Twitter, a year and a half earlier, that provided the spark. And then, early in 2023, it was a minimalistic HTML journal on neocities that provided its own kick, the lesson the same then as earlier: stop consuming things. You have in your possession a device capable of an infinite number of things. Wake up. Sit down and make something. Anything. Just go.