I am ElectricHellKnight, and this is my half-assed pile of HTML. "Why have a website?", you ask? Because I can, that's why.
Go ahead and hit me up on any of the above, I like making new friends.
Recent project: A vintage setup using a QVT-322 terminal and Rasperry Pi
About Me
I am a general nerd, interested in all things techie. Also an advocate for free (as in freedom) everything. Free software, free hardware, free knowledge, and free speech.
"But seriously... why a website?"
There was a time when the internet was a magical place, before everything got so forced and corporate, where every John and Jane Smith had a page like this up on geocities or whatever. Nowadays it seems like the 'net has been blandly distilled into Google, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and, if you're a boomer, Facebook. Everywhere you go someone is fishing for likes/upvotes/thumbs/whatever, or a soulless corporation is trying to monetize your every click. Everything wants you to download some spyware-filled location-services-enabled up-your-ass app, assaulting you with popups about how "this page looks better in the blah blah blah", or how you should totally give them your email to get the latest updates on whatever bullshit, as if you want them.
Once upon a time you could spend hours on the computer just broadly browsing, coming across all sorts of random little personal websites, finding opinions and thoughts from all manner of people. There was a reason it was called "surfing the web". Each one was filled with their own quirks, tpyos, personal style, and taste. Before everything had to be so rigid and templated, and before every Google search turned up 100,000,000 AI-generated listicles, you'd find site after site like this one, serving no value to the user. Just a tiny island out in the open ocean of the web; websites like this were a flag to mark your little bit of territory in the wild. Existing for no other reason than simply to say "I'm here!" They didn't offer anything, and likewise they didn't ask for anything in return. They simply existed for the sake of it.
Anyway, this site serves as an example that making a basic website is very easy, and that it is something I think more people should do. Personally, I feel there is a lot more magic in finding an actual website than a bland cookie cutter profile on some social media in a swarm of others that all look exactly alike. Not everything has to be about a product, sometimes it's okay to do things just to do them.
Wouldn't using a web development service be easier?
Absolutely. Sites like Squarespace and Wix, both of which I have used before, make designing a website trivially easy. They are great tools, and for anything serious or professional and small business, they are almost a necessity. I suck at any type of coding/scripting/formatting, but even compared to someone fairly skilled these tools can almost always do better, and assuredly are faster.
However, I maintain that by using such tools you do lose a little of the magic of doing it yourself. There is something to be said about writing it all out yourself, in a text editor, from the ground up, with no WYSIWYG shenanigans to hold your hand.
Same reason why anybody would choose to do anything the hard way, I guess. Why burn candles when flashlights are brighter? Because they look nice. Why write a handwritten letter when an email is so much easier to send? Because it feels more personal. Why learn to play guitar when you'll never be able to shred as good as Dave Mustaine? Because it's fun.
Want to see more of my self-inflated rants?
By the way, did you know that the web as we know it largely depends on free software? So say thank you to the people much smarter and more talented than myself who make it possible.
Yes, I do realize this site looks like it is straight out of the 90s, but I assure you it is in fact 2024 and everything sucks. Are you worried about how sketchy it looks? Read this.