Basic HTML is the New Punk Folk Explosion - by Zach Mandeville
"My dream is for people to drop out from these major websites, but
stay online. Keep the urge for connection and sharing that makes
social media so appealing, but satisfy the urge in individual,
unique, wonderful ways. I want people to maintain personal sites in
the same way they wrote zines. I want people to share homemade
music through homemade social networks, and to create both just
for the pure love of it. I want our personalities to come through not
just in the words or links we share, but in the URLS we use and the
code we write. I dream of regional communities forming online,
based around organically grown web rings, and for idiosyncrasies
to form in the aesthetics of our sites based on the communities we
learned to code from. Basically, to bring back all the things that
made the early internet so exciting and open and welcoming. It's a
little bit harder, but that's part of the charm. It means the
connections you make are intentional, and everything you create
and share online will always be yours, because you made
everything yourself."
Why I Have a Website and You Should Too - by Jamie Tanna
"Having a website and/or blog is not about being a web developer, nor about being a celebrity of sorts, but is about being a citizen of the Web. This may sound a bit grand, but that's the point - the World Wide Web is this amazing thing that was literally built for everyone. We need to make sure that we are all using it to its best, and owning a piece of it to show big companies that it's ours, not theirs!"
Fleeting Memories of Youth and the Increasing Impermanence of Culture: How will we remember our personal past in the future? - By Carl Svensson
"Thousands upon thousands of pictures to swipe through, none of them scrutinized for significance, none of them carefully selected for depicting important life events. Instead we're met by an overwhelming blur of everyday nonsense of our own creation: so many plates of food, so many daily outfits, so many sunsets and trees and beers and shoes and faces and cars and cities. In fact, do we perhaps approach our growing mountains of photographic documentation with a tiny, nagging sense of guilt? Guilt about what irrelevant or embarrassing minutiae we'll find in lieu of what we're actually looking for, or guilt about that we should, but don't have the time, to perform some culling? At least I miss the joyous anticipation a stack of newly developed photos used to invoke.
And how do we turn this into a meaningful ritual? It's the same swiping and searching we do for everything else these days, no different from the mind-numbing doomscrolling we torment ourselves with on social media. What associations does that bring about, when we reminisce about life and love the same way we dull our senses with mindless, temporary distractions?"
Rediscovering the Small Web - By Felix "Parimal" Satyal
"Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting."
Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?" - By Melon King
"The Web Revival is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share. The Web Revival often references the early Internet, but it's not about recreating a bygone web; the Web Revival is about reviving the spirit of openness and fresh excitement that surrounded the Web in its earliest days."
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? - By Laurel Schwulst
"Today more than ever, we need individuals rather than corporations to guide the web’s future. The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google. Individuals can steer the web back to its original architecture simply by having a website."