Making a website gave me a creative outlet in a time I needed it the most.

Back in 2021, I suffered from a strain in my rhomboid muscle. Preventing me from being able to draw for MONTHS. Drawing is my main creative outlet, and it has been for ages. So not being able to draw literally anything for a period of time stressed me out big time.

(Now in the current day with continuing physcial therapy it has helped me tremedously and I am making great progress in my recovery. I'm actually able to draw things again!!! While I'm not at my old pace just yet, I know in due time I will be back to my old self.)

I started working on my website before this happened. Due to wanting a place I can truly call my own, my growing hatred for social media, and the current state of the web, and a myriad of other reasons. (And this was BEFORE Crypto, NFT, Web 3.0 and Metaverse crap began to become seemingly even more inescapable from hearing about on those social platforms as it has in 2022.)

I was able to work on my Neocities a lot in my free time as I recovered and regained more range of motion, bit by bit, I grew my site. Coding a site is a lot like making an illustration. Together with your hands, and your mind, you build something out of nothing. Instead of it being a piece of paper or a digital drawing file, it is the program you choose to build your code in. Either it be Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio or even the Neocities code editor itself. And that’s really beautiful to me.

Just like with any art medium, illustration, 3d, writing and more, the sky is the limit. With coding and building your own little site, you can make a piece of art entirely all your own. Either it be a blog, personal site, fansite, shrine, you name it! There is a true beauty in coding your own site, seeing it grow over time. It’s incredibly rewarding. Being able to create my own space and express myself in with coding helped me so much and continues to help me. (Even though I can draw again now as said earlier.)

Making my site, a place driven by the love for old geocities of the past I would frequent and pass by in my youth, a place where people put their passions and dedicated free time into making. Posting my art, sharing links, putting blog posts on there, making shrines for favorite characters, games, and anime, making a whole section just dedicated to my favorite anime ship from a 1982 movie, and so, so much more. I feel truly free on it. Free to express myself without fear and without the worries of things being taken from me from data collectors to be monetized.

It’s given me so much happiness! I’ve made wonderful connections from my site, and I’m glad my site has brought joy to others as they have told me, because making it has given me so much joy itself. It’s a wonderful outlet for me and I look forward to making my site continue to grow, and put more of my passion and love into it.

Making your own space on the web is beautiful. You can do whatever your heart desires with your design. You can choose the colors, font(s), backgrounds, graphics, the music if you want some, and so, so much more and arrange them how you want to make something entirely and uniquely you. And it’s a powerful act. Crafting a space you call your own, that you made yourself, out of lines of html, css, and javascript if you choose to add some.

Coding is like using a pencil, paintbrush, or any tool for art. With your hands you put love and passion into something in a way you can only do. With your hands you put together code, typing meticulously to get that div’s size and position juuuust right, or tweaking that body section in the CSS to get it to have that look you’re going for, adding some hyperlinks to a site you love so others who pass by your space on the web can click on it and find it too. Coding is art. And it is a truly magnificent way to create.

Making your own site, creating it yourself from the ground up, creating a space that is yours and yours alone, is a radical act in a web that is being hurt by capitalism, and it’s harmful effects on so much, especially the vulnerable, in it’s attempts to monetize every single thing in it’s wake.

Make your own website if you haven’t. It’s worth giving a try! It’s helped me a ton, and maybe it will help you too.