The first question from fellow Netizens may be regarding the Netscape motif. The reason for that is just that I think it's fun. Although Mozilla survives today in Firefox, I feel like the wrong companies won the browser wars, so more blue and cyan I get to see, the better.

Having said that, it's not like I would have ever made a site like this back in the days of Geocities and AOL Instant Messenger, but now that I have the skills (and the nostalgia), I mean, why not? But where this is basically a personal site made up of smaller sites, I thought a web-directory front end was fitting.

As for why make a personal site at all? In short, I subscribe to Indie Web principles, where I aim to own my own content and control where it goes. By having my own site, I can post freely and with more intent, and my actions are not tracked for the purposes of comapnies selling my data. While this site may look like a big expermient in self-expression, it is really more about digital independence and agency.

A few old sites I used to visit that made the internet fun!

Lots of us who came of age in the early days of the internet remember a time when the web was a fun place. As it became more corporatised, it's become very less fun... I need not explain this. I mean, just go to any social media site and, once you scroll past a lot of algorithm-fed slop, stop and read any comments section on a post that "matters".

Meanwhile, the old web that we "miss" has been steadily been making a comeback. I hesitate to say that it never went away, but as of this writing (2026), the kinds of sites that we used to love are still out there. Sites with personal content, guest books, and even chat boxes are out there, waiting to be enjoyed and digested at a much slower pace than the bottomless web feeds of short-form content that we've all learned to put up with, all to be someone's product at the cost of our own attention span. On the smaller side of the web, it's a much more sane place.

The truth is, the web is really what we make of it. The operative word here is "make." I made this site to have my own piece of digital real estate, and it's made interacting with the web fun again. Its just my opinion, that if even 10% of my friends made their own sites, and put social media in the rear view mirror, the (online) world would be a more enjoyable place.