Written: 2025-12-03
So ever since I made this website in January 2025, pretty much its entire existence has been quite inconsistent and experimental. Sure the writeups and videos are still in tact, but the theme and even layout of this site has been changed a good bit, and theres a not so good reason for that. I'm quite indecisive about these sorts of things and I always have been, but from now on and especially going into 2026, I want this site to be more consistent. This will especially become important when I start self hosting my website and sharing it with more people.
In the beginning, I never really had a good reason to self host. You could argue thats what everyone should do by default in contrast to the centralized and provider dependent internet of today, but it doesnt make a lick of difference to me if all you have is a nothingburger blog. I've never been a particularly great writer, but even if I was, a blog tends to only go so far if thats all you have. That was all most of my older sites used to be, just a lame blog. I've enjoyed working on this site a lot more however since I've tried some new things I don't normally do, but its not exactly a good idea to change the theme and layout of a website nearly as often as you would your vidlii profile. At that point it starts to annoy people and have them say "Really? Again?".
So here is what I've decided to do. I've decided to go back to my roots and decide not only to start using CSS again, but XHTML1.1 instead of HTML3.2 like I've been doing for years now. The reason why I've decided to start doing this is because I can tell that as the website gets more writeups, it will become more tedious to change the theme of the site across the board if I theme everything individually like people tended to do with HTML 3.2 since that standard was made before CSS was even a thing, so the theming was all done within the HTML. This is something you can still do even in more modern HTML versions, but back then there was no CSS. (Yes I'm aware you can use CSS with ANY version of HTML, I'm using XHTML now because I like the stricter error handling) My motivation for doing things this way was to have my site theming compatable with older GUI browsers like xlinks2. That may sound based on paper, and maybe you'd argue it still is in execution, but heres why I no longer agree with this: The early internet had more of an emphasis on websites being a series of digital documents rather than a magazine. I believe the user should be in greater control of how websites are loaded and themed, NOT the other way around. A good deal of us understand this when talking about the bullshit that is modern web design, but people tend to forget this is a problem on the small web as well.
Due to the rise of nostalgia obsession on the internet, many people have a very rose tinted view of the early web as well as clouded judgement on what defines things such as good web design. There are many low hanging fruit examples on the likes of neocities, but I would argue even something as simple as HTML3.2 has some unfortunate drawbacks. For starters, because the theming is done at the html level, that means that if someone doesnt like the way your site looks, its much harder for them to disable/change how your site looks on their browser. Using ematrix wont help you in this situation because unlike CSS which can be separately blocked so you can see just the site without the theming (and then proceed to add your own colors if you wish with other addons), with direct html theming you're forced to either accept how the site looks or resort to a text only browser all together. Sure you could theme over the site regardless, but you wont have as much control this way and things can start to look really weird if you're trying to override the theming of, say, an html 3.2 site with tables and a bright tiled background like mine was before this site update. Using advanced night mode on pale moon with my site at this time for example didnt even darken the background at all, rendering the 'dark mode' useless. Sure its not exactly the best dark theme addon, but something like this should never be an issue.
Now I want to talk about how the writeups were organized. Originally everything was sorted by date published and date updated, but the writeups were in order of published. I considered sorting them by updated but keeping the dates and order, but then I decided I prefer when the date isnt in the open. That may sound strange at first, but people tend to have a recency bias and assume newer = better. This is pretty far from true as I'd argue 'BE the privacy guide' for instance was one of my best writeups despite having been made before this site even existed. Something like that being near the very bottom didnt feel right to me, so I decided to take the 'living writeup' approach and put what I'd argue was my better writeups closer to the top, and from now on giving new writeups a temporary NEW label, more similar to how digdeeper's site is managed for instance. (Don't worry, the dates will still be displayed within the writeups)
Okay, I think I've rambled enough about theming and reorganizing. Now I want to talk about my plans for the future of the site in terms of content. Ever since videos became a part of the equation, thats when I knew it might actually be a good idea to consider self hosting, but I still wasnt sure yet. Now that I've switched to slackware and want to have my own little repository of packages, thats when I realized I'm really starting to enter the 'provider' mindset. I've always been leeching off of providers and maintainers, but if I host my site not just with my own videos on it, but even stuff like my own repo, xmpp, mumble and more, thats when I knew its no longer a question of if but when I will self host.
That being said, I am concerned that once I start self hosting, I'll have to deal with the problems everyone else does such as ICANN, AI scrapers, provider abuse, cloudflare, anubis, etc. I know its possible to avoid all of that, but doing so on the clearnet will only become harder as time goes on. This is why I've decided that moving forward I'm going to take darknets and alternative protocols more seriously. It disappoints me to this day how even the 'kool kidz' over at xmpp complain about the same issues everyone else does. Its not entirely their fault, security by obscurity will only protect you for so long anyways, but it feels like a lot of people just dont even try anymore. Rather than trying true alternatives or making an earnest attempt to fix what we currently have, a lot of us put up with the same nonsense everybody else does (or makes band-aid tier solutions at best). Needless to say the current state of the internet is a dumpster fire and pretending that it isnt is simply naive. Going forward I will be making my site more accessible by making darknet mirrors like tor and i2p and possibly even other protocols like gopher and gemini. That being said, once you get into other protocols, it can become harder to make scripts that syncs everything up like I currently do with my website. Syncing every web mirror up (so long as they all support ssh or ftp in some way) is the easy part, but syncing with other protocols like gopher would require adding converters into the equation, and that might make things complicated unless I treat those protocols as a separate entity, but then they will likely see inferior maintainership. That being said, I would like to get into gopher, and it is worth noting you can actually make gopher holes and gemini capsules in darknets. I rarely see anyone doing that, perhaps for a good reason, but it may be something worth considering.
Anyways, I think I've rambled long enough. Send me an email or message me on xmpp if you have any suggestions or even questions. I'm open to them since tbh, I don't entirely know what I'm doing. Self hosting is going to be a big leap for me, and it will definitely take some time to tackle all this stuff. I'm usually too lazy to even think of doing all of this stuff, but I know soon thats going to need to change. You probably wont see any of the hosting changes and alternative networks until 2026. Currently I'm focused on making the site itself more cohesive so that its at least relatively 'worthy' of such treatment and attention to detail to begin with. The experimentation era has been fun, but now I feel its about time to make this site more focused.