I’ve been threatening to relaunch NuclearGopher.com for years. One rather ridiculous reason I have struggled to make this happen is that I truly and deeply find the modern style of website building to be boring, annoying, and uninspiring.
- Setup a content management system (probably WordPress but if you’re really unsure of what to do you can use something like Bandzoogle or Wix or Strikingly or something)
- Install one of the myriad number of available responsive “beautiful” themes and change some colors and logos
- Start cranking out “content”
- For every special feature you want (comments, newsletter signup, blah blah blah) install a plugin and probably signup for some cloud based subscription service
- To get statistics or visitor info add in Google Analytics or use an SEO optimizer service so your site can secretly track visitors and report the data to marketing firms
Congratulations, you now have a website that looks just like every other site on the internet and you are likely going to pay multiple monthly fees to keep it online!
It’s really not that hard. I’ve built such sites dozens of times. But… honestly? I hate them. They are not memorable or distinctive, they are intrusive and heavy, and they are BORING AS HELL.
I didn’t want to build a site like that. Not for my favorite little site of all time. The thought of doing so was dispiriting. But what was the alternative in the modern era? Surely that is what people expect of websites these days? The entire internet is made up of Every Fucking Bootstrap Site Ever these days, right?
I want a website that is quirky and weird, a site that is memorable, the kind of website that existed during the Old Weird Internet Era. I have nothing against modern web standards, CSS and HTML5 are so much nicer to work with than the primitive Web 1.0 iterations of those technologies, but I want to make something that meets the following criteria:
- No tracking or spying on visitors
- No dependence on Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, etc..)
- A unique flavor that changes over time
- No dependence on third-party external cloud services
In other words, I want to build a website with modern tools that is indie. Indie in design, indie in spirit, indie in execution, and uniquely it’s own beast.
In theory this is straightforward. All you need is:
- A webserver
- Web pages and other content
- Ideas and know how
The problem I was facing as I contemplated this was that the simple, straightforward, “old school” path to building websites is almost non-existent these days and the companies that run traditional web hosting go out of their way to make the creation and administration of such sites challenging. They want you to buy rather than build and since so few people try to build this sort of website anymore they often provide very little support or guidance to help people do so.
But, moron that I am, I put a stake in the ground a few years back and made a landing page at nucleargopher.com that merely rendered our old logo in the middle of the page and held down the fort while I went and educated myself.
I had MANY false starts. I thought I might be able to wrangle WordPress into a shape that made me happy but after half a dozen attempts in which I was just sad about the result I ditched that. I next took a look at a series of “static site generators” which create nicely styled and “plain old HTML” sites without databases and all that and that was closer to what I wanted. Plain text, full control, host anywhere. I fell in love with one in particular. Still, time kept on timing and I was getting no closer to a web site that I would feel good about. The big issue was still themes. I just really hate the look of every theme out there and I kept losing patience at learning yet another templating language. There are just sooooo many of them and none seem to be particularly better or worse than the others.
So I came to a decision. I decided that I was just gonna party like it’s 1999 and damn the torpedos. I picked one easily attainable starting point: a landing page that had a music player on it. And not just any music player but WinAmp (or, to be more accurate, WebAmp, an HTML5 clone of the original WinAmp player). Two days ago, on April Fools Day, I uploaded the updated NuclearGopher.com landing page with two initial songs on the playlist: the new Awkward Bodies cover of The Lavone’s 1986 song “My Adventure Flowerland” and “Hi-Fi” by HighTV (and some kick butt WinAmp skins if you can figure out how to change them). You can go there right now and hear some tunes. It’s the softest of soft launches ever considering that this a website that has essentially been dormant for about 20 years but it was (gasp!) fun.
Today I realized that it would be nice to have a newsletter signup and also the ability to view site traffic statistics. Again I asked myself how exactly I ought to do those things in 2024 without signing up for anything or doing any tracking nonsense. It took a few hours of tinkering because my web hosting provider has incomplete and misleading instructions that are years out of date, but I managed to setup the stats thing (still entirely anonymous, just crunching numbers from the server logs) and I am now auditioning an open-source, self-hosted, newsletter signup tool that will allow visitors to opt-in/out of basic updates about new releases, events, and the rest, again without any tracking or Big Tech involvement. This is how I built websites 25 years ago. By hand, using open-source, maintaining independent control and respecting visitor privacy. It’s kind of ugly right now but in a goofy way that I like more than a fancy theme.
I’m really looking forward to adding to the site, putting up new pages, playing around with the look and feel, throwing in easter eggs and silly bits, and actually having a good time and enjoying the process. It feels like the right way to do it. So, please, feel free to go listen to a couple of songs and take a look at the embryonic new nucleargopher.com. I have interesting plans for it and I promise that the changes won’t be measured in decades or even years from here on out. The internet need not be boring or corporate, dominated by apps, subscriptions, paywalls, and pretentious BS. It used to be fun. I hope I can bring a little bit of fun back to it. It can’t all be as cool as zombo.com but we can try. And those two songs are pretty sweet…