Six months of D-Man’s web! A reflection on productivity, fragmentation of identity and delayed gratification.

On January 4th of this year I started this journey creating my personal website. What was a blank slate then, is now a place that I can truly call my home on the internet. D-Man’s WEB is still very much a work in progress, but I’m happy with how I made it look with my limited coding skills. My understanding of HTML and CSS has improved a lot and learning this new skill is perhaps the biggest reward of the journey. I’m also dipping my toes into Javascript now and then and that is something I surely want to learn more about as time goes on.

Changes

I noticed that having my own website has improved my productivity and my ability to finish what I start. I tend to be interested in almost everything, which makes it hard for me to keep focusing on any one thing. Maybe it’s because having a website means having (at least theoretically) an audience which creates a kind of accountability, but I notice that recently I want to finish an article or a project before I start a new one. I am currently working on my Free Materials Exhibition, which is my biggest project on the site so far. In my mind I am already looking forward to new adventures, but I feel a responsibility to finish the project first and make it presentable before moving on.

In spite of some dramatic events in my personal life, I can say that since I started this project I have noticed overall improvements in my mental wellbeing. I have finally found a creative outlet, a place where I can gather my writings, reviews and poetry. Having a place where this all comes together is very satisfying. I generally have more confidence as well. The netizens I’ve met on Neocities in the past months have also been an uplifting experience for me. The Neocities community is full of interesting people who are not afraid to radically be themselves and love to diverge from the mainstream. Each neighbor site I visit is like entering a new house where I marvel at the way they decorated it, reading the messages on the walls and learning new things along the way.

Fragmentation

This increase in productivity and mental wellbeing made me think about the current state of the internet. A lot of people of Neocities come here to get a break from all the social media apps that dominate the culture. But why does it feel so much better having a personal site than having a Facebook, Instagram or a Reddit profile? I have been pondering on this question and I think the answer is that social media apps fragment our identity. There are so many platforms nowadays and they all try to exploit a certain aspect of our identity. There is Tumblr for fandoms, Pinterest for hobbies, Deviantart for art, Linkedin for professional and many, many more. It’s like us netizens are pressured to rent tiny apartments for each different aspect of our identity to greedy landlords, when we could just own a single home where our identity can remain intact. I can see that a lot people are not happy with the situation, because it creates the need for services like Linktree, which is a bandage solution to fragmentation problem. Having your own website will give you the opportunity to create a single place for every aspect of your identity! You won’t need a Linktree, nor will you have to maintain and check up on six different apps every day. Social media’s only real selling point is the ability to connect with millions of people, but is that really worth the fragmentation?

Delayed Gratification

Another thing I noticed is that since I start posting articles and reviews on my website, the way I receive feedback is very different from how it is on social media sites. Often when I post an article or poem on my website, I don’t get any direct feedback. At first that felt uncomfortable. It made me wonder if my writing was any good or whether I posted it at the wrong time when the English-speaking part of the world was asleep. However, I noticed that feedback for a web 1.0 site comes in more delayed, subtle way. I can tell from the visitor count, or when someone leaves a message in my guest book, that people are enjoying my work. It made me actually internalize the feedback, thinking “I’m sure there are people out there who came to my site today and enjoyed my work”.

I learned that I don’t need immediate feedback on what I wrote to enjoy writing. This experience is actually an example of delayed gratification versus immediate gratification. On Instagram you expect to receive feedback for each individual post because each post has Like and Comment options. However, I think as an artist or writer it may not be desirable to expect feedback on each individual work. Not getting feedback is teaching me to praise myself instead of waiting for external praise. It is teaching me that being a creator is more about leaving a legacy that reflects who I am, than trying to score quit hits. What I hope is that if one day I feel D-Man’s WEB is done or if for whatever reason I stop updating, visitors can continue to visit the page and spend an afternoon or two enjoying my work. I hope that when I revisit my site after a long time I can truly say that I created a place that is personal yet engaging. Entertaining yet thought provoking. Creative yet accessible. Reflecting how I see myself.

A look ahead

The first months of this project were all about setting things up, getting the hang of basic HTML and CSS and making friends online. I feel like I’ve achieved all these goals. Over the next half year I expect to continue working on the Free Materials exhibition. I am thinking about a future project of creating an archive where you can watch movies and cartoons from the public domain, but this is still in the very early brainstorming stage right now. I will be creating a Projects page very soon from where you can visit all my bigger projects. I also have several articles I want to write whenever I get the time. I am trying a ‘less smartphone’ lifestyle right now that I want to tell you about. I want to create a new logo, a favicon and some more pixel art to beautify the site. Furthermore you can expect more film reviews as I am constantly watching movies, but I only review when I feel I have something interesting to say about it. The links page is going to get an update at some point as well.

Enjoy the summer and don’t forget to go outside once in a while!

GIFs and background on this page were made by Katsu from Katsu's GIF Anime