The Purposeless-Driven Site

About 11 years ago, I made my first website.

It was a horrid thing, created with Netscape Communicator, made from a mishmash of visual geegaws, animated gifs, and anything I thought was interesting in digital format with little consideration for aesthetics. Mandelbrot sets, comical images of Anton Lavey and Sammy Davis Junior, and random chunks of text all floated together in an eye-watering cacophony of digital vomit. To my credit, the technology was new, and the tools were limited. Information about how these things were made was sparse and oftentimes incorrect. I was learning on my own and felt satisfied to have made it that far without any guidance which is how a lot of people started out. Lots of people make horrendous blinking animated websites filled with rants at their postman their first time out. It may be some reflection of their internal animus - that they themselves are just a collection of things other people put together with no visual taste and unresolved anger issues - but the beginnings of art are almost never pretty. You have to start somewhere.

I then went on to make numerous other poorly thought out creations of my own, some that never saw the light of day, some that shouldn't have. One was a fake corporate site, ostensibly for my own company that I was the CEO of. Maybe some other company would just happen to stumble on it and say "this looks professional, let's give them lots of money". Others were just looping animation clips of images and nonsensical poetry that seemed to be so popular when Flash was just becoming prominent. The Mystery Date and Band Name Generators, I still stand behind those and only wish I could have kept the files somewhere. There was the Top 5 List site, which had decent intentions, but not enough effort, yet still had it's moments. Technical difficulties abound and still struggling with the graphic design I taught myself with a hacked version of Photoshop, I felt no qualms at the time with advertising the site on a much more popular blog to get people to join in. Then I'd watch the complaints come in about how it didn't really work very well.

Then there were the series of blogs. One just a collection of invention ideas, another a more proper blog with inane detail on the minutea of daily life. Another a combination of the two. I had picked up on the idea of minimalist design and eventually parlayed it into something that didn't make people run away in horror. Having read lots of zines, but never got the gumption to make one myself, I thrilled at the ability to make something so intimate and place it somewhere for like-minded others to see. The temptation to try new things would eventually lead me to randomly break everything, and then recode it all over again, but the end result was a small step in a better direction. Eventually I made a personal site that I was relatively proud of. My tendency to always want to do something original had been a deterrent to the design aesthetic, but I eventually settled on something simple and new that incorporated my own hand-drawn flourishes and a content management system that used only Javascript. Unnecessarily complicated, but it worked, and my written voice was getting better, melding a combination of lists, pseudointellectual meandering, and mocking that same pseudointellectualism. I eventually abandoned the site out of a combination of anger and embarassment that had more to do with the home construction project I was working on at the time than anything else. I took down the site and put my focus on writing in other places.

And that's all been going well and good. I haven't thought about any of those aborted personal web projects and failed ideas for some time. Having seen others abandon their own blogs over and over, it seems like that is the nature of web writing. You write it and throw it into the void, and eventually it dissappears. If it's something meant to reach a larger audience, then there's other outlets that already have that megaphone. If you're writing for yourself, then you just put it in your diary. Those that post their diary for all to see are just yearning for attention disingenuously.

But that's not completely right. There is this small niche of purpose that a personal site can provide akin to a ritual of personal, digital fetishism, slightly exposed to the world to impose a small underlying sense of fear. Something that allows for all the bits and pieces that don't fit anywhere else to fall into place for your own satisfaction. I thought it might be worth trying again.

—March 20th, 2009

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