• Laurel Schwulst

    My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

    Haeun Kim

    I think...

  •  What is a website? 

    So when they ask how to make a website (despite having already “learned”), they are alluding to the technological friction and social pressures that often come along with creating and maintaining a website in 2018.

    If they can't stand technological friction and social pressures, they'll likely take more coding courses or try website builders they've seen in YouTube ads. However, Those 'you-can-soon-be-a-master-of-creating-websites-with-us' type of online courses or website builders have a tendency to focus more on how to make a likeable website rather than on what to make. In that sense, visiting the first website and understanding the energy of HTML is liberating. HTML inevitably makes a deep relationship with 'what'. It would not be an exaggeration even though we say taking enough time to deep dive into our minds to understand what we’re truly craving would be quite meditative and refreshing.

  • It makes perfect sense, then, when individuals tell me they want their website to do the job of “setting the record straight” on who they are and what they do.

    This was the moment Hegel's Lord-bondsman dialectic comes to my mind. Using Cargo or Squarespace to quickly build a website can be helpful for some time, but it fundamentally limits a lof of possibilities. They even encourage template-free writing to look foolish(and especially Squarespace advertises their products too much. You don't have to create a website because other people force you to do so.) No matter how much you can "customize" the given templates, you can't be more liberated than starting from an empty place. So let's try to create an independent website.(If you want.)

  • There are other legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable, monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing, very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work.

    Also, a website can be fun, funny, and ridiculous. You can have a fun, funny, and ridiculous day just by looking at the websites posted on Neocities.

  • My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously.

    You have to code to create a website, and coding is essentially writing. You have to be humble if you want your computer to understand you and enjoy your writing. Therefore, A website creator can be a writer. Also, the website creator can also be an architect. Recently, the concept of digital real estate has been showing off its influence, but the website has always been a space so far. Thankfully, I was also able to build a decent house in Neocities, and I’m sincerely grateful for this.

  •  Why have a website? 

    Today more than ever, we need individuals rather than corporations to guide the web’s future. The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google. Individuals can steer the web back to its original architecture simply by having a website.

    If you understand the web as a list, there are many items(websites) in this list. And there's a gap, a small but clear space between each item. If one item attempts to vibrate using the gap, the vibration will gradually be transmitted to other items. That is the possibility of subversion that an item has.

  •  What can a website be? 

    Website as room: You can also position elements in spatial juxtaposition, or create entrances to adjacent rooms through links. Website as shelf: Consider what surprising juxtapositions you can make on your little shelf. Website as plant: Plants can’t be rushed. They grow on their own. Website as garden: You might spend the less active months journaling in your notebook: less output, more stirring around on input. Website as puddle: There is also no state of “completeness” to a website, like a puddle, since they’re ephemeral by nature. Website as thrown rock that’s now falling deep into the ocean: Thankfully, rocks are plentiful and you can do this over and over again, if you like.

    A website can be anything, but to add one metaphor that is not ‘perfect’ as well, a website can be a table.

  •  The web is what we make it 

    The World Wide Web recently turned 29.

    Years have passed since this essay had written, so the Web would be now in their early thirties. It may be difficult to immediately understand who they are, but there are shared memories and experiences between us. So I just want to say, like a common end of a letter to a friend, ‘Let's keep in touch!’