So, I just read a number of articles about the indie internet and efforts to use personal websites as an alternative to social media profiles. Basically, I read through this list of articles on Sad Girl Online, and I thought, “you know what? It was more fun in the old days when we all had our own homepages to archive our own stuff, and we just hung out on e-mail groups. Maybe I will give myself one over-arching website to collect all my scattered webpages into, and instead of spreading myself out over Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dreamwidth, etc, I’ll just use this one central location for everything I want to put online.
Today, I’ve gathered together my Alex Beecroft, Alex R Oliver and Robyn Beecroft websites, my etsy shop for bargeware, my cover-art portfolio, and a blog on which I’ve barely posted, and smooshed them together into Galadhir’s home on the internet.
I’m fully aware that nobody will ever find this site or blog, but that doesn’t matter much. In fact it may be a bonus. It’s my site, after all, and I can do what I like with it – mix genres as much as I want. Talk about movies seen, books read, morris dances danced, fanfiction written and enjoyed, gardening and permaculture triumphs and cooking experiments with no concern about branding or consistency.
Going backwards to a simpler and less frantic past seems to be a theme of the new world I’m living in – trying to travel less, buy less, reduce, reuse, recycle etc. We are busy drawing down, de-growing, or whatever the phrase is, and going back to tending my own website feels like a step in a similar direction.
I’m an introvert. I can’t deal with the clamour for attention, and I never could. This feels like a good idea, like moving toward a sustainable internet.
Now I need to find out more about mesh-nets
