Welcome to my personal website
Welcome to 2011. You seem confused. Is this not the "old internet" blingee galore paradise you were expecting? Yeah, well this is what my websites looked like before I learnt HTML. 1000000000% more user friendly, right? Your eyes must feel like they've been washed in milk after the shitshow that is the rest of my website. I used the drag-and-drop site builder Weebly, which was severely limited in its customisation options. More than anything, I just wanted a space of my own on the internet, so I made the most of it, picking my favourite out of its very basic themes. I tried Weebly again in my most recent return to website building in 2024, and would you believe it even these small ways of customising your website had been removed. Weebly had been bought by Squarespace and felt more corporate than ever. I hated it, and decided I would rather just make something from scratch. That is how I found Neocities.
But for a long time when I was younger, before I knew of anything better, Weebly was my favourite thing in the entire world. I didn't care that I couldn't customise every single element, I mostly just wanted a place where I could hoard all my cyber pets, write blog posts, and embed my favourite flash games and amateur attempts at coding chatbots. Even though I technically hadn't put any real effort into it, just dragging and dropping elements where I wanted them (often frustrated that Weebly wouldn't let me put them exactly where I wanted) I was really proud of my first website. And I think one of the most wonderful things about it was that this was something I made for its own sake. I knew nobody was going to see it or interact with it, but still I worked on it every single day, filling it with things I loved. My current website is an equal labour of love, if not more so since I have to actually deal with HTML, but I am always aware that someone will see it, interact with it, and that has in part become a motivator. Would I still be equally as committed if I had 0 followers? Maybe, for a while, but I would get bored and abandon it a lot sooner too. I was guilty of that a lot as a kid, forgetting and starting over. Maybe it has to do with the community aspect, or maybe I was just 7. I did eventually end up showing off my website to my classmates (oh the unabashedness of childhood) and delighted in getting comments on my blog after school. Of course, the novelty soon wore off for them and my website was once again silent. It's not so lonely here at vesperings.com, every few weeks or so I will get a comment somewhere or another, and momentarily grow warm in the presence of human connection.
Is my current website far superior in every way to my Weebly one? Absolutely, but you've got to remember that 15 years have passed and I would not be here without it. I think my younger self would be awestruck by my silly little site now. And so, to honour a foundational element of my life, I will attempt to recreate some of my old pages on here. And yes, I did actually have this song playing on my first homepage. As in, I didn't know how to pirate yet (legally, I still have no idea how to do that) so I used to try to be as quiet as I could while physically recording the music, so this is the exact same audio. Go figure.