When I first got back into it in Dec 2023, I tried to recapture the nostalgia of it by launching into the Neocities space using probably the same level of HTML knowledge I had in 1998, the basics I could remember from memory plus the updates I kept up with until 2008 when I moved all my sites to WordPress templates because it was so much easier than coding a layout on my own.

In retrospect I don't hate that I did that - it was a good method to facilitate more writing because I wasn't spending as much energy in the visual aspect of sharing on the web - but I wish I had kept up with coding and designing websites in a different way. Perhaps a small project here and there. At some point social media sucked away all creative forms of sharing and it was super easy to drop a line of text or some photos in a box and send it off to all my friends.

The laziest way to recapture a moment in the web past is to open one of your old layouts and then update the HTML code to draw in new images for your new design. This is what I did for the first few layouts of the personal website I built in Dec 2023.

In fact, this is what I did for all of my sites initially, for at least a year, until I finally broke down and decided that I wanted responsive design because my sites looked very sad everywhere except on my laptop.

This was very much about the rush of sharing ideas and publishing online. Some people attribute that to "social media training," but it's something we all felt in the 90s making websites too. Social media capitalized on something that was already there in other forms of media - you'll feel similarly if you ever send a newsletter to people's inboxes or mail boxes. You made/said/did a thing and you're sharing it with people to connect or grow together.

I did the thing that I find annoying in others. I got caught up in the idea of publishing new things, sharing my ideas, getting it out there as quickly as possible, and forgot about the value of maintenance, pacing my output, and engaging in multiple forms of creativity.

My initial goal of capturing the nostalgia of making websites was sort of met, and I felt for a bit that I captured that moment and the rush of making websites and getting all your ideas published online, it was glaringly obvious immediately that my coding knowledge was very behind on the times.

Although I've continued utilizing those skills in content management and documentation types of jobs professionally, I haven't needed to code anything since probably around 2018. Here are some changes I have been noticing between where I was when I stopped "from scratch" website-making in 2008 and my involvement since Dec 2023.

HTML has more structural elements to consider than just the header stuff and body. People are not putting 1,000 DIVs all over the place anymore. I did have to learn HTML5 for a job in 2014, so that helped refresh my memory and give me some of those foundations.

Stylesheets define nearly all of the non-structural elements now and CSS can be used for more than layout/format - also sometimes images and animations.

Accessibility is central to coding now. Although I stopped coding around 2008, it had declined in engagement over the years before that. ARIA was just getting momentum over those years.

Flash is dead! This impacted us at work, but at the time I was so far out of website world that I didn't even think about how it impacted the overall experience of websites. It's so much better without flash.

Table rules are VERY strict. Though I was out of the "table as layout" coding trend (and into DIVs all over the place), it's now entirely out of standard to use a table for layout in any context so do not do it.

Flexbox and CSS grid instead of floats and clearfix hacks.

Browsers have more or less standardized support for things so you no longer have to explicitly call out certain browsers for coding features to work. I was never good at this anyway - I tested and coded for two major browsers and left it at that.

CSS variables?? How useful - wish I had found out about this when I first got back into it in 2023, but it wasn't until I started looking at tutorials to #dobetter that I started seeing that in things.

Responsive design (everything about it)

When I first got into websites in 1998 it was a thing I did OBSESSIVELY; I enjoyed coding, I liked to spend time on the computer, I liked that I could type things and put images together and out would come this creative digital capsule of a moment in my life. I liked connecting with others who did the same, and who shared immersive descriptions of their lives. It was my Main Hobby.

Now, 25 years later, making sites is not my Main Hobby, it is one among a plethora of hobbies. It has its place in my system of "Creative Things I Do" and "Ways I Document Life."

There's no formalized structure to this system, except that I know I must engage in a variety of activities in order to get the most use out of it. If I "just journal" or "only make sites" or "only do videos" then I burn out pretty quickly and stop making anything. In this context, I've been thinking lately about what I use websites for.

When I engaged in it in 2023 I didn't really have a "long-term goal" musing on where I wanted it to go (I rarely do, I just make stuff and either it becomes part of my practice or I never do it again), but I wanted to challenge myself to make a 1998-2002-era personal website with all the features: a section about me, something educational from my experience, a section for my visitors, and adoptables.

I did extensive research before building my first site in over a decade and did a deep dive into the internet archive to find patterns and elements in my site that I wanted to keep in this new version of Max on the Web. I dug through old drives and website folders and found a lot of the archives, though I know my first sites are on a 3.5 floppy disk in a box somewhere.

Well, I did it. I did the thing. I made the 1998-2002-era personal website and achieved the goal. It wasn't a blog and there was no need to update it once it was done. Like the sites back then:

My "about me" area included 100 things lists, quiz results, and a visual tour of my home.

The "visitor" section included tiny pixel adoptable characters that I made back then. Sometimes I see them on people's sites, I need to put them back up for adoption! It also had my toybox, a collection of playlists for various moods, and zines. You can find the zines here now:

My 'life experience' educational thing was a history of the web, which I think this little Leaflet will probably become a more organized version of.

But I still wanted to make sites and design pages and learn things and update my coding knowledge.

I started doing a month in review series to help think about how I might use a site to document my life. That helped me keep my focus and attention on making sites with a purpose. As a result, a lot of little ideas came out of it and I've built a nice system of things.

This was one of the things I really missed about making sites. Some were static projects, others were ever-evolving. I always had a large assortment of expression across several domains or services.

I would write a month-in-review and then set aside a handful of ideas to add to an existing site or create a new one. My media collections and thoughts/reviews about them, collected lessons learned each year, my playlists which at one point (as mix CDs) were high in demand so I figure at least someone might like them?