When I first started working on a website for myself, my plan was to use WordPress’ functionality but to give it a theme I built myself. I wanted to go really old-school, yesterweb style with its appearance, while still embracing the flexibility of having a CMS / blogging software running in the background.

I started trying to build that site theme, but it languished for well over a year. I’m fairly competent with HTML and CSS, but once you throw PHP or anything else beyond that into the mix, I start getting confused. And given how few spoons I have these days, I just haven’t been particularly keen on trying to puzzle my way through skinning a WordPress site from scratch.

But the more the big social media platforms lurch towards collapse and/or destroy the mental health of everyone using them, the more I find myself still wanting that little space of my own on the internet where I can just . . . share whatever I like, in whatever format I like, in a space that I control. So I decided to just grab a super old, ridiculously basic but still attractive (to me at least) pre-made WordPress theme and restart from there. I’ll customize that as I go along, and over time maybe I’ll keep plugging away at the from-scratch theme on a test server or something until I have something ready to go live. A customized pre-made WordPress theme still gives me a lot more options for fun and self-expression than most social media sites.

And since now I have the beginnings of a website that doesn’t just look like a jumble of text, I’m feeling a lot more inclined to actually work on adding content to it. Hopefully I’ll be able to open it for public viewing soon.

One thing I’m hoping to get more into with the blog side of things, aside from just getting back into the habit of blogging more in general, is including little bits of microblogging here and there. I know my posts tend to run long, but I actually am capable of brevity, too! It’s just that I rarely felt comfortable enough on most other platforms to put my thoughts out there. It’s different on my website, though: it’s not a content mill, it’s just my cosy space on the internet, where likely most of the people reading and interacting will be people I’m already friends with (and anyone who isn’t friendly can be easily deleted and ignored.)

I want to get into sharing content I like from other sites via embed or screenshot, too. I tend to use the social media profiles I do still use as a kind of social bookmarking tool: mostly just reblogging interesting things from other people on that platform rather than creating content of my own. I’d like to still include that social sharing aspect on my website, in such a way that I can collect things from any other platform and gather them here.

I’m still trying to decide whether to use embeds or screencaps or a mix of both. Embeds are easier, more accessible, and make proper attribution a snap, but who even knows if anything I share from Twitter will still be there in 5 years’ time? Screencaps would serve as a more permanent archival tool, but they’re more work to capture, upload, make accessible to people with visual impairments, and link back to the original post/creator.

(I do also wonder how well embeds will work on Dreamwidth crossposts.)

I’ll probably start with embeds and see how well they work, and maybe try to make a habit of screencapping anything I embed as a “just in case” measure.

If I really do get super into the reposting/content sharing from other platforms, I’ll likely refrain from crossposting everything to Dreamwidth just to avoid spamming my mutuals.