I’m interested in personal web pages, as well as an interest in hand coding of web pages, but also have a strong urge, at this stage of my life, to get some writing out on the internet for anyone who might be interested. A hand coded  site will soon be available, and I’ll provide a link here.

For now, I am using WordPress along with the Elementor Pro plugin to build this site, While I am fascinated by hand coding, I am also very slow at it, not being a software engineer. What I like about Word Press along with the Elementor Pro plugin is the speed in getting thoughts published, after getting the site settings the way I want them.

Another problem with hand coding (for me) is that most of the html/css/javascript editors available are clearly geared to professionals in the fields of web design and software engineering and they assume a fairly high level of expertise at the outset – something I don’t have, hence my glacial speed of working.

I believe that personal web sites such as mine should be simple in structure. They aren’t trying to generate revenue, do SEO, impress potential clients, generate clicks, or any of the other hoops that have to be jumped through to make a web site “pay”. 

I became interested in the internet in the early 90’s. Web site code had to be simple then, as a 128 or 256 kilobit dial up connection was considered fast. I remember when some English departments in those years were offering courses in html as a supplement to writing skills. That made a lot of sense to me, an English major and lover of sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming, to me, is akin to html in that it helps to see the stucture of sentences in a way that html helps to see the structure of text, of information.

In the 1990’s my grand hope for the internet was that it would consist of millions of individual web sites where anyone could communicate their ideas for anyone to read and respond to, perhaps via a small website of their own. This seemed to be what geocities was about. Instead commercial interests started taking over, Microsoft tried to control the internet with proprietary code, thus ending the hope that html would  adhere to standards,  and be learned by millions of non-computer scientists.  A lot of what is found in searching Microsoft’s role in the early internet tends to portray Microsoft as a positive influence, but I don’t think that’s how it was seen at the time. Bill gates penned his famous “internet Tidal Wave” memo in 1995, and a lot has been written about that, here is a random starting point. It’s long, and I haven’t read it yet. I’ll post more when I have finished it.

As time went by, Google and Facebook grew and grew and grew and begat TickTock, Instagram, YouTube and on and on diminishing to hope for a small scale, personalized internet. It is not my purpose here to present a history of the internet as it has evolved in a not always beneficial way. The history of the internet is fascinating and frustrating to read about. The story has been told well and thoroughly in many books and articles.   I am mainly singing the praises of personal web sites and their vast usefulness to the human race — communication without manipulation, tracking, and data warehousing.