Hi, I wanted to share some stuff I do/choices I make with regards to my site here. This isn't meant to be advice or anything, I just often think to myself when looking at other people's sites "ooh, I wonder why this is done in that way" (because I don't know shit XD), and figured I might explain some of the decisions I have made with my site for anyone curious :)
Categories
This was a bit hard to conceptualize initially because I don't really 'think' about myself day to day, It feels more like I just exist and am doing stuff. This is not so say I dislike or don't care about myself, I think it's more just a way of stress/anxiety management that I fell into over time. I am also not constantly hounded with the small-talk associated with most jobs, so I don't have the 'exercise' of talking about myself in this way (wrapping up your whole existence in a consumable sentence/conversation for someone else). If you ask me what I've been up to lately I usually give "uhhhh ummm" for a bit too long before working out what to say, lmao.
Explaining neurodivergent nuance aside, I was interested in creating a hobbies/interests blog and it just took a while to work out how to word/categorize those things for me. I wanted it to be simple and well defined so that as a reader you can look at the categories and ignore the ones you aren't interested in. This led to me grouping together some naturally aligned stuff, like Linux & FOSS in general, or my 'Alt Tech' section that covers the vageuly related retro/second hand tech and repairs. It might be a bit on the nose to call it 'Alt', but I feel like saying you 'like tech' today might imply you love generative AI, crypto, and buy a new iphone every year, which is absolutely not what I am into. It's probably redundant to say "I am conscious about the wording I use" (being a blog on the 'indie web') but it is the case, even with little stuff like naming the 'Internet' section. I initially thought of 'alt web' but was like "well the web is one of many internet protocols" and I had been exploring Gemini and Gopher sites at the time, so 'Internet' is more approriate.
Simplicity
I wanted to keep everything very simple with my site, as I was just starting with blogging. Whittling down to six categories felt manageable, both from my perspective running the site, and I imagine as a reader having six portals that open up into their own thing is pretty easy to follow. I initially looked into using Zonelots because it introduces tagging into the Zonelets blog code I am using. I opted not too, partially due to my own experiences seeing pages of 100+ tags and being overwhelmed (especially on like social media), and figured that just plain HTML linking each post in relevant categories would be simpler than the Zonelots workflow. This decision had the added benefit of making my site usable without javascript.
If you are unaware, the Zonelets blog code uses javascript for populating a few things site wide (that makes it very easy to use as a beginner). This includes the navbar and footer on each page, the 'Recent Posts' on the homepage, the entirety of the 'Archive' page, and the blog post titles/dates. I like not having to update every single page if I make changes to the navbar/footer, and the Recent Posts/Archive is nice to have. But I also like having my site viewable on 'everything', and Zonelets won't work without javascript. I initially encountered this when making another site, and decided to manually make and update a site map for accessibility there. It's a really minor thing that probably effects nobody viewing this, but I think it's neat that I can visit my own site from old/low resource browsers like Lynx, Links, and Dillo (probably NetSurf too).
Pictured: Me botting my views
I like the simplicity of my site, and frankly I wouldn't know how to make anything graphical and fancy looking even if I wanted to, lol. The things that I have added to the Zonelets workflow (plain HTML post links and RSS feed updating) are still very simple and don't prevent me from doing what I enjoy, writing posts like this :)
Limiting photos
I limit photos on my site overall, and also in file size. It's just because I don't want to pay for extra storage. If I keep my site mostly text-based then it's going to take a LONG time to fill up the 1GB that comes with free Neocities. I also usually resize photos to 600px wide so they fit well in the theme I use, and so they don't break the theme on mobile. I usually save photo space for the hardware pages and the occasional demonstration image (or shitty meme). I also figured less photos would work better with RSS, but in my experience feed readers actually do really well with photos and post layouts.
If I wanted to add more photos in the future and was still storage limited, I think I would just link from Pixelfed. It doesn't have the walled-garden 'you need to log in to view anything' of other photo sharing sites, nor does it contain trackers when you link (at least according to my UBO). They don't seem to have a photo storage limit (in the .social instance anyway) and they aren't AI scraping your stuff like most photo sites (although there's probably external sources doing that to them)
CCO/Public Domain
To be crystal clear; I am not suggesting that you or anyone else should do this, I am just explaining why I do it. Licensing denotes ownership and potential income of what you make/own, you should not freely give up ownership of something you made (to public domain) without seriously considering the loss of that creation, any income related to it, and what other people may do with it upon reuse.
I list my stuff (all text and most photos) as public domain because I am just blabbing about whatever I am interested in for my own enjoyment, most of what I write isn't creative/unique anyway, and I don't do this for views, follows, engagement, or income. There is nothing wrong with doing creative stuff for a following and associated income, it's just not what I want/need to do. If anyone ever wanted to 'take' any ideas, phrasing, or even conceptual stuff I put forward here, I want them to be free to do so without having to stop and think "oh is this plagiarism/copying?" or "do I need to make attribution or 'share-alike'" or "is my site technically 'commercial' because I can recieve tips?" etc. This is why I didn't go with any of the other creative commons licenses that require attribution, sharing-alike, or non-commerical use. My stuff is free for anyone to use and I didn't want fear associated with "what if AI scrapes" or "what if bad reuse" to get in the way of that, or in other terms I don't want to restrict/punish any 'good' use in fear of 'bad' use.
Post Length
This isn't a conscious decision XD. I feel that over time I have improved at being more succinct with what I write, while still sounding like how I talk/think. I figured that would make for shorter posts, but I guess now I have more to say, or a better grasp of writing everything that I want to say. I have no feelings either way on this, I don't have a strict structure with anything I do here, it's just funny to me when starting a post thinking "oh yeah this'll be short" and then it's the longest thing I've written in a while (kinda like this post XD). I know when I first started this site I put a lot of information on the category pages, as a way to more accurately represent myself with the fewer posts I had then, and now I feel the desire to make those more concise from time to time. I don't really like to go back and edit posts though, aside from adding/fixing stuff (links, spelling), so they kind of sit there as a capture of my thoughts and writing ability/style at the moment of posting.
Anyway,thanks for reading :)