When I was 13-years old, I published my first website. It was made almost entirely using tables, with a bit of CSS thrown in, and was meant to host both my blog and the isometric pixel art I then spent hours everyday creating and putting online, under the name "eyetoeye".
An example of the kind of thing I had on my first website.
This website lasted a good number of years, and underwent several redesigns. When I bored of pixel art, I got rid of that, and focused on blogging instead. When I started taking photographs as a new hobby, I put those up where the pixel art used to be. Then, around the time I was serving NS, I lost interest in blogging altogether. The website lay idle for a while as I struggled to think of a new purpose for it. Eventually, I decided it wasn't worth it anymore paying a company S$150 a year for a website I often even forgot was there. I took the thing down, terminated my contract, and turned to social media for my online presence.
I don't think I ever gave up, however, on the idea of having my own place on the web, one that wasn't mediated by social networking paradigms, and all the complexities and constraints they entailed. On Sunday, 31 Aug 2014, after years of indecision and procrastination, I finally started cobbling this homepage together. HTML and CSS. That's all it would contain. No scripting languages, no databases, no content management systems to speak of; even though, as a teenager, I'd learnt to use all these things. I wanted this new homepage to be simple. Simple, personal, and utterly mine.
So here it is. This time around I'm hosting it on Neocities, a project apparently started by this guy Kyle Drake, to bring the good old days of fun, messy, 1990s Geocities websites back to the web. I'm still not entirely sure what I'll do with it. I had this idea of publishing lists of things; books I've read, recipes I'm interested in trying, foreign words I've learnt, links to websites I find cool, etc. Since hosting on Neocities is free — although I intend to pay to support it at some point — I don't feel any need to decide right away what I'm going to put on here. So let's wait and see!
Copyright © Kevin Wong