Personal Website - Tumblr Posts
“What is a personal website even FOR?“
When making a personal website for the first time, you may ask yourself this!
The answer is: fucking anything. Personal websites don’t have to be “presentable” if they’re not tied to your IRL identity or whatever. Look at old captures of geocities, tripod, angelfire sites. You had dedicated single-topic sites, sure, but you also had sites that were arbitrary, slapdash little hoards of the website owner’s Favorite Things, no matter how unrelated they were.
Some suggestions:
links to your 3 favorite other websites.
an essay about how cool hydraulic engines are
a sanctuary for all your favorite images, such as memes, that you’ve collected over the years
facts about centipedes you think everyone should know
competitive hardcore sims 2 speedrunning strategies
a portfolio of your artwork, or links to other people’s artwork you enjoy
elaborate lies and hoaxes (maybe even a whole arg)
useful survival tips specific to where you come from (personal recipes, trustworthy doctors, good music venues, eats that are both good and affordable, hot goss on who’s up to what horseshit on your city council/school board/university faculty/whatever)
original fiction that noone on social media cares about because people only like and reblog about what they already know. explain your entire fictional country that you wanna put in a real novel one day.
making people not have to dig through your tags to know where to find all your dracula meta (including the shipping manifesto you wrote 10 years ago)
speaking of fandom, you know that one piece of media you love that nobody else seems to have heard of? you post into the void and nobody reblogs or likes? nothing in the tags? Yea. Built a shrine to that explaining why EVERYONE should care about it. tell me how that pirated copy of Telefang made you the human being you are today
explaining your personal philosophies on life without worrying that you will get reblogged by randos calling you cringe
just generally being fucking a weird, unrelatable, unmarketable, extremely specific ass human being
It's been a minute and for once, it's not just because I was swiming in the dumpster after being down in a trash bin ☺
No, this time I was gone because I wanted to do something more with my writing and get it seen by more people. While Tumblr has helped my self-esteem (somewhat), it's obviously harder to be seen on here.
Then, it was like the universe heard me and it dropped this post to me.
So after some convincing myself to try, I attempted learning html and......... It was actually pretty fun.
All things considered, I'm no tech person, I dislike math, and cannot stand things that are too technical; but their resources broke it down in a way I could understand and I built my first website from the ground up 🕺
So, if your curious about what it looks like, you can check it out here!
And maybe don't look at it on mobile 😅
Also, obviously, I'm still new to codding so the site looks as basic as basic can be. I'm also waiting to learn javascript, so there's nothing too advanced on there either.
Regardless, I'm extremely proud of myself for sticking with this and trying it out. Physically, I haven't been so well so this is a good distraction while I get better.
But, let me tell you what you can expect to see!
More info about my stories (like how they came to be)
Personal goals for my stories
Excerpts of what I've written
Self-made covers
Character concepts
Funny tidbits about the development of my stories
I'm not finished with everything I wanna do, and some things I'll have to learn how to make, but I eventually plan to have more pages including:
An about me page
Pages for my ideas that are either dead, half-made, or ideas that are nothing more than that.
Some of my fanfictions
A hobbies and interests page
And pages for my 250k word collection of short stories: Quiet Girl
I'm excited for everything I have planned, so if you like what you see here, stop by my page and see if you like anything else!
That's all from me, thanks for reading and I hope things are okay now and they stay okay with you 🍂
Yearly reminder to everyone trying to find alternatives to tumblr/social media in general: go make a Neocities account and teach yourself basic HTML and post your art/writing/shitposts there.
It does take extra time to set up (but there are templates out there!) but it is so so worth it to have a site that is 100% YOURS!
You don’t even have to be that good at coding. I’m not. My site is not very accessible via mobile devices but that is fine with me (keeps me off my phone) but there are plenty of ways to make your site mobile friendly. There are plenty of bare bones/accessible sites I adore purely for the media on it.
Imagine having your site on your phone and showing someone- hey! I coded this from scratch. And I didn’t even have to pay a company like squarespace. All your images, links, writings, in one place. I have my fandom edits, memes, fanart, and custom graphics there.
Neocities has a very bare bones follower and comment system, but you can disable this if you want your site to truly abstain from any social media-isms. I use it because its a great way to meet other webmasters and get help with coding problems. Neocities isn't an exact replacement for Tumblr (no reblogging here) but html coding is an invaluable skill to know, as is keeping a personal website in this day in age.
The awesome thing about having your own website is if, god forbid, Neocities goes down, you can move your site to any other number of hosting platforms (like Teacake.org). Your site is truly YOURS, and no one else (shitty tech CEO cough cough) can take it away from you.
If you need help getting started, I recommend checking out sadgrl.online. (More links to resources in the comments section of this post).
I know neocities has been talked about before, especially within my follower circle, but I thought I'd bring it up again for anyone unaware of this awesome platform.