lafes.netHello gentle reader. You've reached a small, hand-crafted website made by a computer geek who goes by the name of "lafe" online.
At the time you are reading this the site is very much under construction. I'm still working on the basic structure and styling.
To-do list for this website:
- Improve templating
- Create a small div on the home page to surface the most recent blog posts
- Create rss/atom feed
- Start a digital garden
As I've gotten basic templating set up, I've started a little blog. 11ty is handling the boiler plate, and each entry is just a small snippet of html. I've never been very good at keeping a blog updated, so we'll see how that goes.
I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this site, and I think my first goal will be to start a digital garden. By it's nature it will be a perpetual work in progress.
Recently the steady enshittification of the internet has started to disgust me enough that I've been motivated to explore alternatives to the growing dystopia. This has led me to explorations of the so-called IndieWeb and SmolWeb movements. I've looked for smaller, more intentional communities of people. It reminds me of the early days of the internet when we (the nerds of the day) moved from BBSes and mainframes to usenet, IRC, and gopher for community. And yes, the web too, but it was a simpler thing back then. Those things are still out there! IRC, usenet, and gopher are still going strong, and maybe even having a bit of a resurgence as people look for alternatives. There are some new technologies worth exploring too! Gemini is trying to be the new gopher. Various federation technologies are now starting to add real alternatives to the corporate hellscapes. Instead of xitter, facebook, instagram, reddit, tiktok there are now things like Mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, loops, and many others.
The ideas of journaling, blogging, collecting notes and knowledge, and sharing interests have always appealed to me. Keeping up with any of these individual practices, however, never seems to stick for very long. I dive in and out of these things seemingly at random.
I think part of the problem is that I don't really know who any of that is for. I can make entries in a blog or on Mastodon but, let's be honest, no one really wants to read my random bursts of output. There's a strikingly similar problem with journaling... it's just that I don't really want to read my own bursts of output either.
Just the act of writing is supposed to be good for the soul. Maybe this is true, so I keep looking for ways to incorporate this. Pair that with the obvious utility of writing guides or sharing helpful knowledge, for myself and for others, and the digital garden idea seems to really fit.
Plus, just maybe, if I mash all the ideas together to some extent, I'll actually keep up with it. Add a dash of "it's fun to play with technology" and perhaps this website will really grow into something, some day. Let's find out, theoretical reader, together.