working on my website feels like tending to my plants. here, i have a little space for myself where i can put whatever i want, and maintaining it takes some work but it's not awful work.
it's work i enjoy doing because it's a relaxing and low-stakes way to engage with computers, which is a luxury i am not often afforded as someone who works with computers for a living. outside of tending my digital garden and writing features at work, my interactions with Computers™ are typically... adversarial to say the least.
and in a world where computers are increasingly being employed by comic book villains to do comic book villain shit, it's nice to have a counterexample to help ground myself when i start to view these miraculous machines as exclusively 'the weapon of the enemy'.
putting love into it
added on
for me, an important property of the site is the fact that (outside of the header nav and the footer) every part of the page you're viewing right now was written by me and typed with my own fingers in some corner of the world.
i love being able to appreciate details. and i love that making my web site this way lets me pay attention to all kinds of silly details! if i abstract that out, for example by using markdown to write my pages, that would be harder to do.
there's something really nice about performing maintenance to something that you treat like a living organism. when i'm taking care of my basil plants, i have to trim it occasionally and of course water it. in a way, a website can be kind of like a creature that you take care of, nurture and maintain. and you can put real love into that.
there is an element of escapism in it for me, i think. this website is deliberately simple and free of too much of the abstraction that i tend to encounter when doing development for my dayjob. i just get to write silly little sentences here and play with stylesheets and LARP a simpler world, free of the complexity that computers normally involve for me, both on a technical level but also on a moral level. a personal website is kind of "peak innocence" when compared to any website that you're forced to be on during the course of your everyday life.
it's also bounded. there is only so much overengineering you can do if you're restricted to using markup and stylesheets (though you'd be surprised how many hours i've sunk into my stylesheets, you can do some absolutely crazy stuff with modern CSS!!).
and yes, it is kind of annoying to type out all this HTML stuff, but that's part of it. i put real work into making this page, and now you're reading it! isn't that actually pretty cool??