What the Smallweb Means to Me

I was reading something recently on Mastodon and the post was talking about how websites and webdesign used to be all about intrinsic motivation (creativity, inspiration, etc.) rather than extrinsic (money, side hustle, &c.). And I definitely feel like something’s been lost over time, but some people are trying to reclaim and restore that past ethos.

I made my first website in 1996 on Eugene FreeNet (EFN), a small ISP in my hometown of Eugene, OR that provided dialup internet, telnet shell access, and a moderate amount of webspace; all you had to do was put it under a public_html directory off of your homedir, and bam! You have a webpage. These days, EFN is no more; I think a larger regional ISP, PEAK, took over at some point. And I’m sure they’re fine, but I really loved EFN. Connecting to EFN via telnet is where I learned my way around (t)csh, and eventually bash. I remember coding my website by hand in HTML, back when that was something people did all the time, and even writing Perl scripts. I spent a lot of time not only using, but learning, from the scripts at Matt’s Script Archive (unfortunately, they’re full of security holes and badly coded, I hear, by modern standards at least). I felt like I knew my way around Perl, just a little bit, and could make it do some cool things on my webpage. I liked messing about with guestbooks and site counters and all of that fun stuff. The Web was more fun back then, and everything seemed full of possibility.

I remember hearing about emacs, the text editor (in which I’m writing this post), having not only a text adventure (the celebrated Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure), but also the “psychologist” ELIZA in it, accessible pretty easily after loading the editor. I thought that was so cool! In middle school in the mid-’90s, we had only Macs at school, while I had a DOS/Windows PC at home. So MacOS System 7 (I think?) was an interesting new adventure as well. ELIZA was available on Mac as well and I remember having lots of interesting conversations with it, so I thought it was cool that it would run on UNIX as well. I’m pretty confident EFN was running on some kind of UNIX, rather than Linux. We had a number of ISPs over the years, starting with AOL (DOS client!), then CompuServe, and eventually a 40Kb/s symmetric DSL through a small Eugene ISP called ContiNet. Believe me, that was blazing speed compared to the 28.8kbps or 56kbps dialup we had for a long time! Eventually we got Comcast, I think, but that wasn’t until I was almost done with undergrad.

But I digress. I spent a lot of time on EFN learning about the shell, in text-mode alone. I would work on webpages, usually in pico, and sometimes work on them on my computer locally. I loved playing around with ftp access. Telnet was always fun. I was very grateful to have access to this sort of environment, and the best thing is that it was offered freely, as a community service. They felt it was important enough for everyone who wanted it to have access to this resource. I even spent some time volunteering at EFN at one point, getting to know one of the sysadmins there, who actually had gone to high school with my mom (although I think they were in different circles). Small world, small web.

I never really did anything fancy with the web until much later. I think the fanciest thing I used to work on HTML was Macromedia Dreamweaver. I seem to remember Netscape came with some sort of HTML WYSIWYG editor as well, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called. Whenever I used those things, though, they would always spit out very convoluted HTML that I couldn’t easily parse when looking at it raw, and that frustrated me. I liked writing simple code myself where I knew what everything did, and could make sense of it at a glance. I still to this day have never learned CSS, and I don’t know that I care to. It seems to be the modern standard, and there’s probably something even fancier I don’t know about that all the cool kids are using, but I’m pretty oldschool. Even learning Markdown has been a bit of a jump for me, although I find it very elegant and usable overall. Hilariously, though, I’d prefer to write simple code and have Hugo interpret it and “compile” it into something that looks nice when viewed in a browser. I’d rather just do the high-level stuff. By that same token, I should love an interpreted language like Python, but I’d rather code (badly) in C anyday. Whenever I look at a Python script I cannot make heads or tails of it.

I really like a minimalist aesthetic. Over the years, I’ve used things like WordPress and Squarespace. I had a blog on Xanga for awhile, around 2002-05, then switched to WordPress, which I used for a long, long time. WordPress started out really cool and lowkey, but over the years became very corporate and antithetical to its origins, which is disappointing. I would not want to use it now. Squarespace was very corporate from the beginning, and I only used it to set up a tenure-track jobs site when I was on the market trying to find a job as a professor. While the WYSIWYG nature of it was helpful sometimes, I didn’t like the artificial, IMHO, limitations it had. I ended up going back to WordPress for a bit, but eventually got tired of how maximalist it all seemed. So I arrived at using Hugo, and I’ve been using it for the last almost 6 years and loving it.

Although I do a lot in LibreOffice for word processing, for simplicity’s sake, I really prefer plaintext as much as possible. Markdown is a lovely way to augment plaintext and make it look fancy, but you don’t have to be fancy when writing it, as Markdown will take care of that for you. Now call me a weirdo, but I was so frustrated by the idea of using Word for my dissertation template, when doing the formatting for the editorial office, that I opted to use their badly-aged, nigh-deprecated LaTeX template. I wrote the chapters in LibreOffice, but did the final formatting and editing in LaTeX, so all plaintext, which compiled and looked wonderful, after a lot of tweaking. Sometimes I’ll even work harder, not smarter, for simplicity’s sake. I know that sounds weird, but I like the ethos. I like keeping it simple as much as possible. I don’t need to pay for fancy tools and have that money just line corporations’ pockets. I would much rather use open-source tools that are freely available to everyone, and adjust my workflow as needed. I know FOSS isn’t for everyone, and it has its own problems, especially with accessibility. FOSS needs to do better at accessibility, for sure.

So I’ve talked a lot about tools to use. Plaintext editors, whatever form that may be (emacs, Notepad, Mousepad, your text editor of choice, &c.). FOSS tools, if possible, or I always used to like freeware and, to a lesser extent, shareware, when I was on DOS and Windows rather than Linux. But I think the aesthetic is lovely. Not everyone can afford their own webspace, unfortunately, like I have here. My server is about 16 euros a month, the hosting is about $11 USD/year, so it can add up, but it’s worth it to me. I’m happy to provide whatever I can to people, free of charge, in hopes that it makes someone’s life better or work easier. Self-hosting is awesome if you have the means to do so. I would love to find a way to provide webspace to others, but I don’t know what that would look like, and unfortunately I would only feel comfortable doing that sort of thing with a few people. I think it’s nice when small organizations provide that sort of thing and can do so at scale; I have a limited amount of resources for my server and I feel like I’ve almost maxed out what I can do with it at the moment, with what is on here. And that’s OK.

I really like the idea behind things like Neocities, which attempts to recapture the vibes of ’90s Geocities. When I was younger, I didn’t want to have to ask my parents to pay for webhosting or something of the like, and I don’t think they would have. So I found free services, wherever possible, and accepted the limitations they came with (usually webspace, rather than traffic, &c.). I would love for there to be mssive amounts of free webspace out there for people to use, for sure. I don’t think limitation per se is necessarily a good thing. But limitations like a limit to one’s webspace does inspire minimalism and the “smallweb” aesthetic. Simpler websites, more efficient ones, less nonsense. A focus on the content and what you’re trying to express, rather than unnecessary flashiness. I won’t say I entirely miss the <blink> tag, but it was kinda fun to see that in the wild on websites. Or the <marquee> tag &c. Oldschool HTML had some fun stuff and you could do some really interesting things with it if you wanted. With all the site generators out there these days, yes, it has leveled the playing field in that anyone can create a website, which is an overall good thing. I want more people to be able to share their thoughts with the world without technology being a barrier. However, ideally I’d like to see these services as a stepping stone to more minimalist solutions. Remember on MySpace where you could do your own custom HTML and make everything look pretty? Even there, in that box of sorts, there was room to play and for people to make it their own.

I want to read websites that seem lived-in, cozy, like they were actually written by people. I don’t want to read AI slop nonsense that I cannot understand; garbage in, garbage out, I guess? Maybe this is a pivot to “digital pastoralism,” if you will, although that’s kind of an oxymoron. The smallweb is like writing digital shepherd poetry, a la Vergil’s Eclogues. Or maybe let’s throw back to Theocritus, Vergil’s own inspiration. The simpler the website, the easier it is to parse with accessibility tools as well. For example, the Hugo theme I’m using now, Rusty Typewriter, kindly threw in a light/dark mode toggle. I’ve been wanting to set that up for a long time, but didn’t know how to do it. I have a webpage or two on how to do this, but I’ve never taken the plunge, as it involves not only raw HTML, but also JavaScript. I guess the theme probably did that for me, but that’s fine. I don’t know a ton about accessibility tools myself, but I imagine they’ll take plaintext just fine as an input (Markdown, though is an open question, but one can hope). So I love that about the smallweb aesthetic. I want to go back to the ’90s ethos of minimalism, but using the modern tools we have today. And no AI. None of it. nequaquam. My site in general is an homage, and an offering, to that dream, and I’m deeply happy to be able to share it with y’all. <3