Why all this nonsense?
I’ve been thinking for a long time about building a personal website again. Two reasons have delayed it.
First, as a web developer my job is to build websites all day. Don’t get me wrong—I love it. I spend my whole day doing what I wanted to do as a teenager, and I get paid for it. That’s great. But building a website in my free time isn’t really the best way to unwind.
Second, I miss the good old days of the Internet: Microsoft FrontPage, a simple index.html, an about.html in the CSS folder — or maybe even a bit of inline styling — uploading it via FileZilla to a friend’s server, and boom! live. We could worry about the content later.
The content was simply anything that was fun and interesting to me. And I wasn’t the only one. There were thousands of us—a kind of underground subculture, long before the rise of (anti‑)social networks.
Then I discovered the IndieWeb and neocities.org. The same spirit. Nothing there is pixel‑perfect. There are no design mockups in advance. There’s no performance pressure. It’s just about the joy of creating. Fantastic. That’s what I wanted too. But I also wanted to be able to blog and have an RSS feed. I didn’t want a huge CMS with a database behind it.
So began a long journey of many tests. I tried Bearblog, Pagecord, omg.lol, a self‑built solution… but something always felt missing.
I wanted to blog, and I wanted a place to showcase my drawings and photos in a gallery. Then I found Strawberry Starter (an 11ty fork) for Neocities. A full‑circle moment. I gave it a try and it worked straight away. Fantastic. It had everything I wanted: blogging, static pages, HTML, Markdown, custom CSS. If I want, it can be complex, but fundamentally it’s still just a few linked HTML pages with a CSS file. And it still breathes the anarchic air of the IndieWeb.
That’s it - —my new home on the IndieWeb. My big middle finger to Big Tech, social media, and their algorithms. Feel free to look around, make yourself comfortable. Everything is a work in progress. Subscribe to my RSS feed, drop me an email, and I’d be happy if you stop by again sometime.