The Web I Love

The other night, I woke up around 3:00 am and couldn’t go back to sleep. I reached for my phone then started browsing. Somehow Greg Tate came to mind. I wanted to reread his essays. I found a handful of his work from the Village Voice and a few from Rollin Stones and Spin. As much as I love Tate’s articulate criticism, particularly on music, I hated reading his essays filled with annoying ads and JavaScripts that not only slowed down the loading to a crawl, but also kept freezing up the page. I wanted to just take all the content and create a book website without ads and JavaScript and with high-quality typography and editorial design. I want to keep his legacy alive. I might be running into the copyright issue even though I won’t make any money off it.

One of the perks of working at the law school is that every once in a while I would receive a bobblehead of a Supreme Court Justice from a generous and creative law professor. In the past ten years, my collection has grown. From Antonin Scalia to Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Sonia Maria Sotomayor, I have a display on my bookcase at work. I heard the rumor that some of these bobbleheads had been sold on eBay for a few grants a pop. They are gifts and priceless to me. I will keep them for as long as I can and I wanted to make a website showcasing them. I also wanted to learn more about them since I still don’t know many of them, especially the Justices from the past.

Just the thought of creating passion projects like these makes me love the web even more. I love to just design a website and share it to the world. All I need is some great content to markup in HTML, style in CSS, and set in flexible typefaces. I don’t need bloated CMS, JavaScripts, and third-party ads. For almost two decades working on the web, I sat out on all the frameworks. Even WordPress has become way too complicated for me to develop a theme. Full-site editing is where WordPress is heading. I have become more of a WordPress user than a developer. For my own blog, I am using about ten percent of WordPress’s capacity. I am still using my own theme, which has an index.php, style.css, and screenshot.png. From the start, I knew I wanted to keep my blog simple and easy to update. I use no photos, no JavaScripts, and no bloated CSS. I am still using the Classic Editor, which I don’t know how long the support would last.

So far, my simple sites with just HTML and CSS still stand the test of time. I hope all of my sites will stay online for as long as I am alive. I don’t want to worry about them after I am gone. My body will return to dusk and my sites will return to nothingness. I have learned to accept the reality of it instead of trying to keep my legacy alive.