Early this morning, this website reached 200,000 views! While I know a certain number of those views are AI scrapers and search-engine spiders (there's less of that on this site than others because of my ROBOTS.TXT file), quite a few of them were real people looking at my website and going, "huh, old website... wait, updated April 2025?!" In my wildest dreams, it's because of people making practical use of my guides on computer use and dephoning, and soon my guide on being creative without using generative AI. Yes, that's the next project. I found out on Tumblr the other week that there are real actual kids in school right now who are incapable of even independent thought without ChatGPT, and that's quite frankly scary as all fuck. The corporate feudal state has been trying to put the skids on independent thought for literal decades at this point, and ChatGPT has finally done it. With the world going in a distinctly fascist direction as it is, it's more important than ever before that we think critically and question the words of authority figures! Fortunately, thought happens naturally while you create something on your own, so there's no way to totally suppress it.
Anyway, that's a subject for another time.
Like I said in the 100-followers spectacular, this site started as a blog site in May 2023. It had been about 10 years since I'd written any HTML at that point, beyond just basic formatting tags on Tumblr, so I needed a bit of assistance with my code. Rather than turning to any online tutorial or using a template, I decided to make an HTML document in LibreOffice and then pick it apart in Notepad. If you look at the code on any of my early blog posts, you'll find that I use inline styling elements, rather than establishing a stylesheet in either a STYLE tag or a CSS file. The reason for this is LibreOffice. Since people are strange, WYSIWYG web editors will typically eschew all-encompassing stylesheets in favour of inline styling, so that users can move text boxes and stuff around the page without disrupting anything. Most old-school web developers would prefer to format their pages using something like this...
<style>
p {
line-height: 120%;
margin-left: 15%;
margin-right: 15%;
}
</style>
...if they format per-page. Most devs prefer using a CSS file (often named "style.css" so it's easy to remember when making new pages) and instruct the browser to load it alongside the rest of the code. I don't do that because I change my mind a lot and I don't want to keep defining new span classes everytime I want to make something look different. This may be the preferred method, but webpage editing software would probably generate inline code formatted like this...
<p align="left" style="line-height: 120%; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%">
I say "old school web developers" because, anymore, professional devs rely on plugins for WordPress and Wix than on actual code. Not me though, I was gonna build this site with my own hands from absolute scratch! I found it was easier to just copy LibreOffice's code, since I wasn't really concerned with making my site look "modern", in any sense of the word. Basically, I needed to know how to make wider margins, since my first website ever, back in high school, was optimised for 800x600 screens so the text could go all the way to the edges without being uncomfortable to read; and on my very first Neocities site (a long-abandoned Super NES fansite called SuperForeverCom), I made liberal use of linebreaks, which simulated the effect of wide margins, but made it hard to edit anything that was already written. It took about a year and a half for me to decide to start implementing STYLE tags on all of my pages. New pages get the new formatting, but I have way too many blog posts and miscellaneous other pages on this site to ever completely change everything. Certain essential pages got the new formatting and, if I ever have to edit a page for whatever reason, I'll reformat it too, but I'm gonna let the old code stand on most of the old pages. They look complete shite on mobile browsers, but that's why Firefox has a Reader View.
Back when I broke 100 followers, I hadn't revised my dephoning guide at that point. I looked into it a little more and discovered that featurephones are still a thing that exist; these are your prepaid phones that don't really connect to the internet in any more than basic form, the kind of thing they sell at convenience stores and wholesale shops. I decided it was time at long last to look it over again, especially considering the (at the time) impending doom faced by every USAmerican, and how our only hope is to dephone if we harbour any ideas of personal privacy ever again.
I don't get people who say "I don't really care about being private". I can't relate to that. Usually it's in relation to running some computer program or mobile app or another; like Microsoft Office or some stupid game. You're seriously willing to seat a corporate representative in your home at all times, listening to your every word, making note of everything you buy at every store you go to, waiting for you to say something that its corporate masters can use to curry the favour of Elon Musk? You're seriously going to hand the fascist dictatorship the last vestige of freedom you had left in exchange for being able to put shadows inside text? Please take this question in the spirit I intended: what the fuck are you talking about? What's next? You gonna sign your critical thinking over to ChatGPT? Gonna let the AI models fuck your wife? Gonna start policing your own thoughts for thoughtcrime? What the actual hell is wrong with you? You think this is just going to be limited to the United States? Well, won't that be shock and awe for you when your national police agency breaks down your door in a raid because you expressed support for Palestine once and the prime minister is afraid of having Elon terminate your country's internet service. Fine. Never mind. I'll just stop giving advice. No I won't. For every 1 person who doesn't care about his privacy, there are 100 people who do care, and those are the people I'm trying to reach. "Trackers Georg, who lives in a cave and feeds data to 3000 algorithms daily, is an outlier adn should not have been counted."
Let's see... what else? Basically, everytime I stumble upon a new piece of HTML or CSS I think looks practical, my site is the Guinea pig. When I was making my very first site, CSS was still pretty much restricted to Firefox and Safari, since Microsoft Internet Explorer didn't start including support for it across all versions until Windows XP. I should mention, my computer applications II classroom hadn't been modernised since it was established in the late '90s, so our computers had Pentium III processors and ran Windows 2000. They were already pretty obsolete by the time I got to them in sophomore year, so we didn't cover CSS too much. Also, as I understand, a lot of elements hadn't been standardised yet? Or something. There were 3 different ways you could recolour text and every web dev text had a different idea of what the "proper" way was. Fortunately, as I've gotten back into web dev these days, I've found CSS isn't all that difficult to understand; it's semantic, there aren't a lot of weird abbreviations, and the commands all do what they sound like they would do. It's just that, occasionally, you have to do some maths in order to figure out where to put something. That having been said, I don't really like CSS all that much. "Easy to understand" doesn't mean "best thing ever". Defining link colours and click feedback in CSS is an unnecessarily long procedure, where you need to define a new script for each click state. Whereas, in regular old HTML, you could define all that crap in your BODY tag. Then, of course, text alignment. If you think I'm wasting my time defining a new span class just to shove this bit of text over to the right, when I could just as easily do that with <p align="right">, you've got 5 more things coming. There's some stuff I like CSS for, like my text hider script, but if there's something I can accomplish more easily in deprecated HTML, then hey! It's 2006 again.
At this point, I would like to personally apologise to all my Neocities mutuals who do not see their names or site buttons on my homepage. Neocities refuses to show me my followers in an order that makes any sense, and this doesn't play well with my own natural tendencies toward inaction. While I am trying to do better in the Neighbour Wall Backlog department, I know there are some mutuals who accidentally fell through the cracks. If we're moots and you don't see your site on my homepage anywhere, hit me up, 'cos I'm not gonna know about it otherwise.
Finally, 200 thousand views! Dayum! That's 199,995 more views than I thought I was going to get when I started this site. I figured I'd get a few clickthroughs from my Tumblr account, and of course the search engines, but I'm actually reaching people on this host! It still makes me a little teary thinking about that sometimes, especially when I accidentally encounter a link to my dephoning guide out in the wilds someplace. I've made 3 of my best online friends ever on this site, and certainly I think very fondly of every one of my mutuals. This is really the way social networking is supposed to work: it's about the socialising, not the content, and not the numbers. Even though I appreciate the 200k views, it was never about numbers. Some of my followers have more views, some have more followers, some have both, but the point is that we're creating a new web for ourselves here and that's the point. Unlike Facebook, Shitter, Tumblr, and even Bluesky, I can be assured that all 285 of my followers are real people who saw my website and thought "you know, that's pretty cool. I'm gonna follow her."
Anyway, time for me to get back to work and make this site an even better place.