Today I built a silly webpage by hand in a couple of hours. (I’m not going to tell you what it was, except that it was frivolous af.)
I started out by looking for a template, but everything I found was way too involved, so I ended up writing the HTML and CSS from scratch, throwing it in a cloud-hosted directory, and nudging the DNS settings to point there.
This turned out to be a ridiculously nostalgic experience. I built a lot of weird little websites like this when I was about eleven years old, saving the HTML of sites that I liked so that I could access them when the phone line was being used by someone else, and changing pieces around to figure out how it all fit together.
It struck me that:
a) by this measure I’ve been doing web dev for almost a quarter-century now 😳
b) there is nothing stopping me from making websites this way. I can still write HTML and yeet it out there if I want to, no matter what it’s for. Pages load quickly. It’s not fancy. It works. Underneath it all, the web is still there.
If you feel so inclined, I can highly recommend seizing an afternoon, taking a silly webpage idea, and having a play.