let me say something - browsing the Web. I like browsing the Web. Sites, small sites, personal sites, static sites, tech sites, writing sites, blogs, journals, logs and on and on. Browsing the Web is fun. More importantly, browsing the Web is POSSIBLE, which was basically not the case 5+ years ago. I don't mean going from site-to-site - that's always been available, I mean going from links, to blogrolls, to webrings, to dense inner-world websites/services (:cough: Nightfall City :cough:), simplistic portfolios, a photo with a bio, a life journal rife with manifestos and meaning.

I just spent over an hour exploring blogrolls, and blogs, and sites, and /about pages, and /now pages, and /uses pages, and I can definitely say I am happy(er) now with the WWW than I was half a decade ago. Pre-COVID, when everything was the inescapable status quo, cynicism wasn't just in the air, but the lingo people spoke to have *any* exchange online. Many (I, so many I know) wanted to move on from that, I, and most others I know, certainly did.

If I could put symbolic flame to arrow to send to the sinking ship of social media accounts and un-used profiles on those services right now, I would. Yea, still millions on there, let them be, for those going back to the ocean of the web - to better shores and more promise, the small (just normal) web exists, and I love it.

inquiry

The key to online happiness is avoiding search engines as much as possible, and truly traversing the web of links. That's when/how I find the best online reading experience.

Search results have been so clearly disassociated from content itself in favor of advertising dictates for.. has it really been a couple decades already? But, oh, how glorious it's been to find the web as invented/intended is still there, and better than ever, especially in contrast to the cold lifeless content flat line kowtowing to what advertising can abide.

tffb

The key to online happiness

...sits back, wipes forehead, smirks quietly to himself - relieved and consoled, that the answer (key) to online happiness is about to be unveiled in it's non-filtered glory so I can finally recoup the decades lost to online discomfort and bewilderment ;)

just kidding Inquiry

And yes, SURFING the Web is what is enjoyable about online use. In fact, I think the term "surfing" the web came around long before search engines. So add in search and you have surfing with training fins on the board! :D

I am working on a new site btw. I will do the search engine ignore BS so many recommend (do not crawl, AI bots to nban, et al) but really I will just enjoy writing the stuff and putting it into a little html template I making right now, and then adding the needed tags: p, h3, br, i, etc per-post and putting online if/when I need to. Again, GNOME Editor is the best thing since sliced Linux

inquiry

Some mighty fine links down this path:

No CSS Club

tffb

CSS-free sites (to me) always seemed inconvenienced for no particular benefit. Not to me, if it looks ok, it looks ok (idc what someone does with their site). But, when I tried to make an HTML-only site in the past, I always wound up using a stylesheet file either directly from w3school or making my own or whatever. The new project I am working on will use a stylesheet from scratch, albeit a very simple one. The rest is only html, from the template ("theme") to the navigation and everything else. Less "bare bones" and just "scaffolding-like". Still, it achieves the font size/font style I want, the borders (blank space) on either side of each entry, the blank space between entries, etc. The header is done in ASCII style, although not actual ASCII (it is just 12pt Monospace font). That will actually be a screenshot uploaded at top-center, though.

idk why I am describing all this. Will try to get it online Friday.

Will look halfway decent. :)

inquiry

My temporary fandom was in the area of fun reads I chanced upon there.

As for CSS or not, well, peoples got to do what they think/feel they gots to do.

In my experience - which I admit is likely all "me", and not technology flaw(s) - a dabble slippery-slopes to "how about a little more?", and next thing I know I've reinvented the notion of "kludge", and the f***er *still* doesn't do what I really want it to do, yet I'm panting with racing heart from struggling with convoluted documentation and advice that doesn't work because its authors didn't realize there was something about their device that made it seem to work in the general case, etc.

Next stage is conflating that misery with writing, baby gets flushed with the sullied html/css water, and I'm fetal position back to the peace of ASCII text in a file displayed in either vim or "less"....

(And, oh yes, the working directory *will* be filled with versions of html/css files sometimes ending in hopefully monotonically increasing integers, but sometimes with the letter 'x', sometimes with suffixes like '.good', '.keep-this', and so on.. and of *course* all of them have commented out attempts too poorly commented on to remember what they did or how they work... such that if/when I return to them, I'll have no idea what came closest to what I was hoping to achieve, and then I feel like an idiot because look at all those other people getting it to work per their hopes and/or dreams, and.. and.. and....)

normal web