[Reflecting on my first year on Neocities]

FORAGING 🌿
Neocities has been my residence for almost a year, save for a few months of inactivity sprinkled in here and there. The days were long, but the year was short. I can not believe it’s time to reflect.

TINDER AND KINDLING 🪵
I knew of neocities long before I decided to try my hand at coding my own website, beyond academia. This was before interest in the indie web sparked my curiosity.

What led me to satisfy my curiosity was how corporatized and minimalistic social media is. Although I was young at the time, I was just old enough to experience the transition of social media from personalized and people centered, to creating a captive audience for bombardment of ads, dopamine hits (likes/engagement/views), and algorithms controlling what appears on feeds. What I wanted was a customizable, slow going, community oriented, experience that did not make me feel like I was constantly being coerced into buying something.

I was intimidated over the prospect of having to code a website from scratch. It was not like a school project with clear direction and an objective. There were no rules, meaning the possibilities were endless, but still vastly limited due to my lack of skills. I remember feeling embarrassed over my original layouts because I could not quite get them to look how I envisioned them.

I told myself to judge my layouts based on my skill level at the moment, and that practice has a funny way of improving skills so slowly that it’s barely noticeable in the moment. It also did not take long to establish the motif. My aesthetic has long been acquired based on my interests, thus it naturally peeks through or consumes everything I touch.

Consider my website, devoured.

IGNITE! 🔥
You would see creativity as a core trait, if you broke me down into my bare essentials, yet I have been dealing with a creative (art) block for the past few years. Coding a website to serve as a dedicated space for all things me, became an outlet that I did not know I needed. I am interested in creating artwork again, even if temporarily.

My website was the tinder and kindling that reignited my passion for art and fuels my interest in web development.

Here’s to 2026 adding fuel to the fire.