How I got into making a personal website and why I continue to maintain mine

I think this article is functionally the same as a manifesto, except if a manifesto could be lame somehow

Article written on June 7th, 2025

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The How

The first real social platform I existed on was DeviantArt in 2013, which, if you somehow don't know, is a platform focused on the posting of art. Before a certain time, DeviantArt would allow their users to customize their pages with HTML (and CSS if you paid for it, if I remember correctly). I got my start for HTML coding by coding the pages of DeviantArt groups, which had fewer restrictions on HTML/CSS customization and carried over a few of those skills to decorating my own page (though I only had access to HTML, since I've never given DeviantArt a dime). My page looked like crap, but damn was I proud of it.

Sometime later in 2019, DeviantArt released Eclipse, which was a complete redo of how DeviantArt looked. The UI was changed to fit other modern website designs, to be more clean and sleek. This included removing HTML/CSS styling, and damn was I gutted. While my account page didn't have much going for it (though I still wish I had an archive for it) I had the feeling that eventually, this change would come to DeviantArt groups too, which it did. After this, my usage of DeviantArt would continue, but eventually peter out the following year in 2020.

In the years following, my public online presence was negligible. I tried Twitter for a little while but the algorithmic rage quickly got to me and I deleted my profile not long after (a bullet dodged considering the state of Twitter now, LMAO). The only places I really existed were Tumblr and Discord, but on Discord I only hanged out with friends I already had, and on Tumblr I never really felt like posting the same way I did on DeviantArt (well, up until AFTER I made my website).

Fast forward to 2022, which is when I first caught wind of Neocities and promptly made my website. Truthfully, I have no memory of how I heard of this place. My mind tells me it was through Tumblr, but the "evidence" on my blog suggests I found out in 2023, which is incongruous. Anyways, I know when I first heard about Neocities, I not long after thought about my time on DeviantArt. I think my initial plan was to reinstate my old DeviantArt page code, but as I realized the scope of my new project, being able to work with a full website and not just a section of a page, my plans changed...

Ever since that fateful day, I've been semi-regularly updating my website for 3 years, which is longer than I ever bothered with Twitter, Instagram, or other social sites which I've tried. But as for the reason for that, it's now time to get into...

The Why

Past Experience

Like I mentioned earlier, I did not go into making a hand-coded website without any knowledge of CSS. This made the plunge less daunting since the whole process felt like a refresher rather than learning a completely new skill.

Aesthetic and Functional Diversity

Functions

When you're hand-coding your personal website, what your website can do is only limited by your ability to code and execute it. Currently, my website has the following functions:

  1. It's a gallery for my art and comics (WITH a more proper comic viewing system thanks to Rarebit!)

  2. It's a place to host information about my original characters

  3. It's a place to host my creative writing, including OC lore and worldbuilding

  4. It's a place for some long-form personal writing

  5. It's a place where I can show off a little of my favorite tunes (largely thanks to WebAmp)

  6. It's a place where I can promote things I like

  7. It's a place where I can host resource/information for others

And the thing that seals the deal for me is that all of these functions are in one place. As the person who is updating all this shit, I like to have it all in one place as opposed to spread apart on 3-4 different websites. And even if there was some miracle site that had all of these functions in one, they'd probably have some massive catch that would keep me off the place. I will say that my current host, Neocities, has its own catches such as only being able to upload certain file types and code restrictions for free users. However, I know if I paid like 5-10 dollars per month to some hosting service (or to Neocities) I could very well do whatever the hell I wanted with my website, and probably more than what I could get paying for any specialized site.

Aesthetics

"There's never a boring website on Neocities", is what I think to myself sometimes when I look through the activity tab, where all the latest site updates are congregated. I don't have time to look through the contents of each site, but I get such a big glimpse in personality based only on the aesthetics webmasters choose for their site.

Aesthetic diversity also applies to individual pages within one website. For example, while the style of my website is pretty unified across the "main" portions, the aesthetics and layout of my character pages or my site zones vary wildly depending on the subject of each page. I don't know of any service run by some company that would let me run like that.

Full Control/Portability

(I kinda don't know what to call this section)

It is not uncommon for once-popular social platforms to die eventually. You could build your entire platform on one place for years only for the place to go down within a month. Rebuilding from that can be devastating. The same could very well happen to me, however the key difference is the amount of control I have over my site. While you could edit your code through Neocities directly, me and a lot of other webmasters would recommend that you get some text editor instead. This not only makes it so editing is easier, but also so that your entire website is on your local computer. This way, should Neocities shut down, you can (somewhat) easily relocate to another host.

Neocities doesn't even have to shut down if I wanted to move. I could do it now. Because unlike mainstream social platforms where the stuff you gain or build is not transferrable to another site (like automatically transferring your Tumblr posts to Twitter, for example), the stuff I make here is not exclusive to Neocities.

Me no like current social medias

You'll see this same spiel on other webmaster's manifestos, so I'll keep my remaining qualms short: