Homepage 21.12.2006

(public draft)

Ever since 2006, creating websites has been a part of my life. My first website dates back to 2006. At elementary school, we had a really cool computer club where we learned HTML, Logo, image manipulation with GIMP and so much more. I still have some files from back then. Sadly, the data on the diskette containing the website is long gone. The website was about dogs and it even contained a quiz that even checked your ansers. Its background was orange and it had tons of animated gifs. I typed it all by hand. The document beginning with the HTML tag, the HEAD where all the metadata is, the BODY that you can actually see in the browser and all DIVs, Ps and BLINKs. It was simple. I got exactly what I typed in the editor. That's where I learned that two characters can have wildly different meanings, even if they look pretty similar. A / will close your tag but \ will do no good. I was 10 years old, 5 years into my computer journey at that point.

In the following years, I kept creating websites for all kinds of things that I liked. There was one for Nintendo characters, a fansite for Firefox, a collection of stock photos that I made, ... The list goes on. At some point, WordPress became really popular and I built Re-Volt Frontend with a friend, a fansite for the racing game Re-Volt. Some more years passed and creating websites would become my job. Or rather, fixing and customizing things that needed a little bit of help. Incompatible plugins, CSS hacks and customizing themes was my work. At some point I started programming plugins myself to add functionality that WordPress was missing. It all amounted to websites that looked and worked okay but you really wouldn't want to see what they looked like beneath the hood. I stopped working there and also promised myself to never touch WordPress again.

Making websites went from scratch building (you know where everything is and you know what everything does) to customizing something you don't fully understand.

I like when data is organized and WordPress organized your data in pages and blog posts. You can write a blog post and it will look nice. You can write another one and you don't have to worry about the style, it will look just the same. Seasons change and you might feel like changing the look of your website, too. WordPress allows you to install a new theme that instantly transforms your website and every single blog post you've written will shine in festive colors. A system that manages my content is nice. The bad thing is, the more I customize it, the more wrinkles start to appear. Another CSS hack has to be put into place. Another plugin I need doesn't play along with my theme. Perhaps the best way to describe it is a disconnect. It just doesn't feel like something that I made, only like something that I tried to make mine but never managed to make it feel like mine.

I tried some more content management systems and the same thing happened. At some point, I just stopped caring about these websites because another version came along and I had to upgrade all the layouts and styles I wrote. The thought of creating my own website that's just the way I need it to be has been with me for years now. I'm happy to say that what you're reading right now is just that. I created paperboat.website, a place for my website, your website and your friends' websites.