This is a new format for me.
I've been trying to get a blogging site off the ground for at least a year now. I've been thinking about making one for longer. So thanks for the excuse to finally get up and get into the nitty gritty of it all! I'm actually having a ton of fun with this, even if I have to write all my prose in the cyberguts of the site editor. I could get used to it in here. It makes me feel like an 80s hacker.
HTML isn't really that complicated, I just like feeling cool. That said, it's definitely its own language. You have to know the shortcuts. I don't know the shortcuts yet, but I want to learn! It's more than a genre convention, it's a genre requirement. HTML: it's what the web is built on!
I'm not sure if learning HTML counts as a connection to material beyond the course. I hope so?
I was inspired to try this by Doug Hesse's Everyday Writing essay. I have experience on digital forums, so I thought, why shouldn't I try and make my own? I've distanced myself from most forms of social media. I find them draining and irritating. They chafe against my sense of individuality.
Hesse describes the "dot.com" site used by the Colorado climbers as "plain and stodgy" on page 109 of his aforementioned essay. I found this description charming. Something he didn't touch on as much in his essay is the amount of control people give up to giant social media conglomerates like Facebook just for the simple fact that they don't need to learn anything themselves. This is fine, and I'm not trying to judge. There's a reason these sites are popular.
But when you give up customization for a low-effort access point, you realize that the digital spaces you pour yourself into don't really belong to you. Meta has made a lot of choices over the years that I despise. These choices are why I don't use Instagram anymore, despite it being a massive part of college life. I found myself wondering if any of the older, more "retro" members of Hesse's climbing group were chafing against Facebook the way I was.
The concequences of a conglomerate decision are enumerated in the "There is No Twitter without Black Twitter" episode of NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast. The host, Brittany Luse, and guest speaker Jason Parham talk about the downfall of Twitter (now stupidly renamed to X) and its building hostility to the Black community it once fostered. This fragility is the tradeoff. You can reach more people on Twitter, but the foundations of the site will always be changing to serve a class of faceless shareholders. They don't care which communities they devastate in the process of transitioning. They just want to make more and more money; or, in Elon's case, they want to go on a power trip where all their little Nazi lapdogs tell them that their dick is massive and their ex-wife totally fumbled them.
And, I mean, look at this site! It may be ugly (for now), but it's mine. I control every aspect of the page I'm typing on. If I wanted to insert a random image of my favorite Pokemon in the middle of this essay, I could do that. And everyone would just have to look at pictures of Blaziken while reading. It would be great. Most importantly, if I wanted to archive all this information, I would just save the HTML files to my computer. I could port this website on my own with ease. Nobody can take that away from me.
Also, I can call Elon a Nazi here. Nobody can stop me. Least of all him, he's a free speech advocate. This is my favorite genre convention of my beautiful, newborn website: I get to do whatever I want, and it's great.