hedgehog standing in front of a brown basket full of daisies. It is holding the stem of one of the flowers. One daisy has fallen out of the basket and is on the ground to the right of the hedgehog.

'What has creating a website done for you?'

On my site's home page I go into what prompted me to join the small web and create a site. I've been here before! Over 25 years ago I had a personal website where I was a member of various webrings and communities. I loved it! It was so awesome. But then I had a lot of things going on in my personal life that kept me from maintaining my website and the connections I had made. And by the time I thought I might be ready to jump back in, the scene had changed drastically. I thought the small web disappeared. But it turns out I just wasn't looking in the right places! It never went away.

a divider bar of 7 daisies chained together, end to end

I found my way to Neocities through a post from someone promoting a web project on the r/internetisbeautiful subreddit. I went to their site to check out their project and found a whole world of personal pages looking like I remembered them from the "old days." Pages that were colorful and artistic and so very creative - nothing like the boring, bland, corporate-looking blogs that seemed to have taken over the internet. And there was community, too! There were webrings and forums, chatboxes and guestbooks! I felt like I had stumbled upon a lost civilization.

I handcoded my long-ago webpage using Notepad. I went the same route this time. I had to learn some new HTML (and forget some old HTML - I loved using that center tag and tables were everywhere!) and CSS was totally new to me. So this is one thing that creating a website has done for me - it's given me the opportunity to learn new things ! Even this little page is an exercise in learning something new. The graphics were originally created to be used with nested tables to get the border effect. I learned about various css border image properties to try and get the same look without using tables.

Another thing that creating this website has done is allowed me to be part of a community again. I have met (in a virtual sense) so many lovely, talented people!

a hedgehog holding a daisy flower standing on a patch of grass. to the right is a daisy growing from the ground and to the right of that is a gray watering can holding 5 daisies

Creating a website led to the discovery of pixel clubs and cliques! I am a member of several clubs and I also revived 2. I don't think of myself as a particularly artistic person but creating pixel art for the clubs is another new skill that I'm learning. It feels really good to flex that artistic muscle!

I'm sure there are probably more but these are a few of the things that creating a website has done for me!

a blinkie sized graphic with a yellow and green checkered border, a hedgehog face on the left and a daisy on the right. It says Kari's Graphics.

This page created for the 32-Bit Community Code Jam #3