According to Neocities, it has been 2 months since I’ve edited this website. The actual time is probably longer, as I’ve been opening the site to use as reference for other projects. This hiatus is partly due to a loss of interest in the alterhuman community, and a loss of interest in web design.
the cyclical nature of interests
I have a few different things I would consider my “main” hobbies- art, web development, crochet, reading. Generally, I am only involved in one or two of these things at a time. Since my last big update, I’ve been returning to art. That was my primary focus for quite some time, and I got involved with ATProto to find new places to share it.
For those who don’t know, the AT Protocol, or ATProto, is “a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications” (ATProto). It’s what Bluesky runs on. In practice, it means that someone can make a website with it and you can sign in with your Bluesky account. While I first started using Bluesky with no interest in the backend, once I realized that I can use a nekoweb subdomain as my handle it was downhill from there.
My interest in art had been waning. I am a storyteller at heart, and visual art just happens to be my chosen medium. I was experimenting with new ways of sharing the worlds I create, and here comes the second nail in the coffin- HTML on Archive of Our Own. I was now officially back into my web development phase.
the “neocities aesthetic” and brutalism
This site started out with a rather common layout here on the indie web. Background tiles, a cool header image, and two sidebars hugging a div called “main” instead of an actual main element. It was not made with the sadgrl layout maker, but I was constantly referencing it using inspect element. I feel this is the core of the “neocities aesthetic,” the base that many of us start out with as we figure out how our website will look, layering it with gifs and effects. This layout is not bad by any means- it is popular for a reason, and is a good base that can be styled in many different ways. Most of this site’s pages started with this, including my rather chaotic homepage.
However, my two most recent pages, the archive and the sitemap, are my two favorites. And they are very simple. The archive is a block layout, instead of the typical flexbox or my preferred gridbox. The sitemap is almost entirely HTML default styling beyond what’s necessary to have light and dark themes. I don’t fully lean into it, but I quite like the brutalist aesthetic in web design.
David Copeland defines brutalism in the context of web design as a focus on content above all else. “A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact,” and anything that is a detriment to this purpose should be removed. While flashy gifs and complex layouts aren’t a bad thing, and are key to the Old Web aesthetic that many indie web enthusiasts strive for, they are not the only way to make a website.
conclusion
Maybe this post will be accompanied by yet another site overhaul. Maybe it won’t. You may notice that this essay has little to do with the primary subject of this site, and that is because sorting out minor aspects of my identity is yet another thing on the wheel of interests, and not one that is in focus right now. I hope you will stick around to see what I do here next.
bibliography
“Protocol Overview | at Protocol.” Atproto.com, atproto.com/guides/overview.
Copeland, David. “Brutalist Web Design.” Brutalist-Web.design, brutalist-web.design/.