Many years ago, I feared arts & ego was a site alone, the last personal site online. Then, thank Gordon Bennett, search engines improved, and site searches revealed, in amongst the myriad cons, other personal sites.
Now, though, the best way I’ve found to explore identity sites online are the wonderfully revived webrings. The still living granddaddy of these revivals is, I believe, the one arts & ego joined a few years ago, the indiewebring. But there are lots of others now, some of which, such as generation lissa, I’m ajoining, many of which I cannot. I can’ honestly join no AI, which applies now, but there’s no way I’m promising I’ll always avoid it: perhaps one day I might need a new cow. I can’t join the veggie ring, because, despite its name, it’s for vegans, not vegetarians like me.
I’ve just found, and promptly joined, the gen lissa webring, a webring very much after my own heart, a webring for old farts who’ve had a site online since 2000–ish. And, mein Gott, amongst the links, there is some great stuff there! I’m browsing the ring, and all the website designs (so far) are original, none look like a me–too design–dead box of carefully rendered soma. My thanx to rmf for curating it.
There’s a lot of nostalgia for 1990s style web design. I agree with the implicit thought that the loss of that aesthetic was throwing the cat out with the litter, but I personally regret to find that a few of these retro–sites are more litter than cat.
arts & ego is noticeably different than many sites on these rings. I could label most of them as feminine, and many are indeed designed by women, sometimes pink and somewhat fluffy, but that’s not it. I could label arts & ego as masculine, too, all black and hard lines, but that’s just as lazy. No, I think the real difference is my photographer aesthetic, as per black background (long before that became fashionable), as per my dislike of the dominance of the rectangle, which could perhaps be labelled as masculine in maybe a minimalist 1930s sense? Perhaps—actually, perhaps that’s perhaps with knobs on.
But just because there’s a clear difference between my site and these other sites doesn’t mean I’ve not got a lot to learn from them. It’s immediately clear to me, from seeing the best of them, that the layout of my text pages is too stark. I need more than photos to break the text up. I’m thinking more banners, not in the sense of my old style of occasional banners, but in the sense of 17th century (I think) style drawn decoration, such as small fluffy decorative line drawings between text sections. It’s something I explored in my youth, long before arts & ego, or indeed the web itself, was around. I’ll have to go back to that, try it out here, and see how it goes. Bonus: it’ll give me an excuse to play with SVG.
Stand out (to me) examples include:
- moxiemoshpit.com has utterly different design principles to those i’ve worked out for arts & ego: it really works well.
- bigbrat.world quite simply made me giggle!
- box.matto.nl is simple simple simple, and the guy likes OpenBSD.
- I don’t really like crowded or retro stuff, but oopsiedoodle.com, appsirgames.neocities.org, seaofstars.neocities.org, manacake.co, inspiremari.nl, & bohemiansultriness.nekoweb.org all do so rather well.
- axel.mx is stylish and precise.
- aelysia.net is sweet, stylish and precise.
- lost-boy.org is a pastel–lovers haven.
- hauntedgraffiti.net opens with a stunning quote.
- And I’d be remiss to omit sentimentalfuturist.net.
All the ring sites, whether mentioned here or not, reflect their owners love of a personal online presence, something that doesn’t stink of a smarmy corporate corruption, so all should be celebrated for what they are, flashing glare or not.