I think I'm nostalgic for the web I never experienced

The first website I used was Club Penguin. The second was YouTube, which I thought was a website specifically designed for sharing Club Penguin cheats. I never really experienced Geocities and small personal websites that existed independently of Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

As I’m making more websites on my own, I’m slowly realizing that I no longer want to see the same UI everywhere. I used to absolutely love Shadcn UI because it let me initialize a new project almost instantly. But now I can’t stand the sameness of seeing un-customized Shadcn UI components all over the web.

I’m not a fan of where the open web is headed. Google seems to have declared war by shoving their AI-generated answers onto every search, and websites are being optimized for search engines, metrics, and the algorithms that aren’t on our side. That’s why I appreciate “old-web” looking websites, even if they have weird layouts and aren’t mobile responsive. When I come across them, I know they’re likely hand-coded, that they sound like a person wrote them, and that they aren’t competing for clicks. It’s like reading someone’s personal journal through a digital medium.

Bring back your view counter, and let me sign your guestbook!