This might could go in the big website topic, but i wanted to ask a question… Has anyone here ever developed a website, only for themselves with no intention that anyone else ever see it.
Like the site i’m developing now, came out of trying a new modality in therapy. And other then the source code for the engine existing on one of my git accounts. One of the obscure ones. It will only ever be deployed on the NAS. But imagine a forum where all the users had multiple alternative identities tied to a single account
Now imagine there’s only ever one account. Yes that’s right i’m building a early 2000s retro style forum software for talking to myself. It sounds insane.
But has anyone else ever done something like this. I must admit it’s somewhat freeing.
Even on my galaxy of personal websites, i feel there are rules. It can look jank but it must look artistically jank. On localhost it’s just janky. Even now before i wrote that it was early 2000s retro style forum software i thought it was a weird blog engine. Now i need to recode an entire view, and only i will ever know or care…
I suppose the readers of this thread now will know, and i’ll post some screenshots from the test instance later to show off a bit.
But my point in saying all this was to document this novel (for me) experience and see if anyone else ever has done anything similar
I was working from various documents all over the place, and since I needed multimedia support, it just made the most sense to go with HTML. But it’s not something I’m ready to show off to anyone else, so I just keep it in the cloud for now.
I think HTML makes a lot of sense for creation in general, due to its ease of use and ability to incorporate multiple files. I think what you’ve described doing so far seems like an act of creative expression, which can absolutely be a form of therapy. And honestly, if you replaced “software” with “novel” or “comic” or anything else, it wouldn’t seem out of place at all–I mean, people have created entire operating systems for their own creative reasons, so I don’t think forum software is any different!
My mom was a serious hobby astrologist in the 1990s, so I started making an HTML astrology encyclopedia for her. Our home computer didn’t have a modem, so it only ever lived on the hard drive. My goal was to make all the relevant terms (planet names, etc) link to one another.
I never finished it, but that was the closest I ever got to a private Web site.
I designed my personal startpage for my use only, but it is public. If it is useful for anyone else, cool.
that sounds fun! making things for yourself IS a really pleasant and freeing experience don’t let the insatiable gaze of hypothetical strangers mess with your process!!
i think forums make a lot of sense to me as a way to organize your thoughts :) i like the organization format of threads and categories and such… my discord server for my four friends and i has a bunch of channels. it feels very tidy
on the private-website side, lots of people make personal wikis! tiddlywiki for example has a whole subculture, and i know it’s not the only personal-wiki setup out there… and we have our startpage thread here! i and plenty of other folks have private homepages we made ourselves! it’s fun, its like having a secret hideout
my regular site is mostly just for me too! it isn’t private, so it’s not exactly the same thing, but the thing that makes it easy and fun for me to work on is completely disregarding other people and what they might think about or want from my site!
Yeah! Many pages on my various websites are for my own reference, and I run a couple of web apps not linked from anywhere. I also keep a personal wiki on my tablet, using Orgzly, that’s mirrored to Codeberg mostly for safekeeping. Its real home is offline. And on the desktop I run Zim Wiki, though mostly to keep dozens of little text files organized.
I used to have a small wiki for my projects, character info, story, etc etc. TBH I cannot remember how I did it because I barely even know some JS and that required much more work to set up. YouTube probably. I might try and make it again, it was pretty useful.
edit:
Just came back to say that I was inspired and reminded so I made my locally hosted mediawiki thing to keep track of my projects again. big thanks @PiusQBird for the post!!
A little while ago, I was wallowing in nostalgia for the early 2010s Internet, so I made a mock Tumblr-style blog just for myself. I posted drawings I had completed and random thoughts, but I quickly dropped it because it didn’t really make me happy and I ultimately realized that the early 2010s Internet was just the lite version of all the problems we have now. I used a JSON file as an index for all the posts, which were written in Markdown. A script would go through the post index, parse all the Markdown source files, and generate the HTML for the post feed. I even had a tagging system and was planning on implementing stuff like filtering posts by tag and organizing groups of posts into pages, just like Tumblr.
I’ve often thought about doing other projects like that and possibly making a whole website just for myself, but I don’t think it’s really what I want since I don’t look back at my own art very often and I barely even spend any time browsing other people’s websites anyway.
I’ve made startpages for myself. (Current one I’m using can be seen here.)
If it counts I have a offline personal wiki set up for my OCs. I never really use it anymore & should probably work on it again.
I also made a character randomizer for when I don’t know what to draw, which failed spectacularly as I forgot about it. Might have to somehow add it to a startpage or something so I actually use it.
Wiki ramblings:
I might end up removing it or storing it externally since it’s using mediawiki & I’m not using it often enough to warrant keeping it. Might use dokuwiki instead since it’s smaller & the articles are easier to backup if I recall correctly. Wish I could figure out how templates work, I’d probably make a custom one for myself that fits my interests since a ton of them aren’t really my thing.
Absolutely! I’ve made a Pokemon GO type table, that I also made public, back when I was playing that because the existing old wiki tables at the time weren’t responsive and were thus a nightmare to view on my phone!
I also have a budget tracker, a kanban board, and a a lot of TODOs!
All very utilitarian. ^^
Okay, that’s very cool! I love the idea, and the LCARS styling.
I had a small one years ago when I was trying to do a ‘101 things in 1001 day’ project and wanted to document it somewhere. It didn’t stick because I chose an inconvenient time to take on long-term commitments (I still think it’s cool as a concept!) so the page was basically just a list of… some 30 of those things
A lot of the pages on my site mostly or solely exist for my own reference. My graphics page was made to hoard all my favorite graphics I saw online so I could free up some PC space, and my bookmarks page was made so that I could refer back to it easily. (That’s why it originally had bookmarks related to piracy on it, before I saw my site starting to gain a non-significant amount of views and took them off. Loose lips sink ships.) The site history, to-do list and old looks section of my ‘about the site’ page are also all made for the sake of my own memory. The ‘cool links’ section of my Dead Plate shrine was made for me to save the cool fanworks I saw online.
The graphics page and bookmarks page, at least, have seemed to prove useful to other people, which is nice! But they’re still being maintained for my benefit.
don’t let the insatiable gaze of hypothetical strangers mess with your process!!
Might have to somehow add it to a startpage or something so I actually use it.
