#1 - 2026-03-07 -  Other entries

Forgive me my rough writing skill; I don't have practice with it. Since I recently started this page, I think it is best opportunity, time even to talk about why, what for and how I made. The details are fresh, so is my memory since I got to it only few days ago from writing this blog entry.

The idea of my own page was always in my head, when I was a kid in early 2010's I have tried making stupid, random pages I don't remember names of with some random wordpress-like editors. Of course, I didn't have persistence or goal with that. Just a cool factor - a cool 'hell yeah' factor that while silenced, has stayed with me prtty much all the time.

As I got older, I started to get nostalgic about my chronically computerized childhood. I started to rediscover and re-indulge myself in various retro computing things, going back to times when windows 95 was main operating system at home (windows XP was and probably still is still too fresh in my conscious to have it in same part of brain, sorry), with me having hand-me-down 486DX4 100mhz windows 95 machine back when I was three to six. Of course at that point it was hopelessly obsolete; so they didn't care how many times I accidentally broke something in it.

As I was looking through polish youtube, for various builds showcases, I have started to stumble upon some of those people using some of very simple html sites to ''benchmark'' their pages against the internet - as in, lower end to show that indeed, there are some things you stil can display on niche, old and comically underpowered electronics of bygone era. My main inspiration was piteusz, and his website - http://piteusz.ovh. It was simply writen, minimalistic, and runs on practically everything that has internet connection. Unlike a lot of for instance geocities websites, it wasn't chaotic self-shrine, but rather something with a function to someone other than being all things considered personal site - at least felt as such to me, obviously I am not Piteusz so I don't know his though process in regards to his page - its really cool and i recommend checking it out though.

That gave me Idea; why not try something for myself. And then I realized why - I can't write a damn blog, less so code anything coherent. ...I then decided to try it anyway. Results were awful...

As I didn't know when and how to start, I started anywhere; with just an idea of me wanting to make a simple start page for myself. I felt like if I nail that, I can move onto trying to make more than that. Obviously 'nailing it' was a lot more of a problem than it is now; I know my site is a hot mess still, just not as much. I initially started to look for easy way; and I stumbled upon https://html5-editor.net/

As html5-editor.net displayed on one side code, and on the other page, with option of moving and putting elements directly in the latter, I got to work at one day in late 2024. As I still had even lesser understanding of things than I do now, I used .png's as graphics, which I uploaded to imgur and pulled them from the link. Result of it was obviously a page that graphic elements of only worked in a modern browser, editor also didn't space the code well, nor didn't adnotate it. It had elements of all versions of html, css etc in the end when I started to introduce smaller changes, informed by just google searches on how to achieve certain outcome. BUT, I made it, it was mine - and no one would take it away from me. It also served my everyday needs, even if it completely failed at being backward compatible as I intended.

Those tools are easy to use, it's just matter of investing time into it - it's a good fun, just like making this page been so far. I then only did small tweaks, mostly in hyperlinks meant to suit my needs and just adding and subtracting buttons. Page was obviously just a local file, which pulled graphics from imgur.

That idea of doing it right, making it backward compatible, run on everything and also actually having more than just local file page stayed with me. In fact as I am only few days away from 25th birthday in time of writing this and starting this page, it came to my mind that having my page as a mark of my presence in this world was something I have always wanted to do. So I began researching domains and host I picked .ovh and starter pack from OVHcloud. Felt like one of cheapest options to approach this, and besides; instinctively .ohv fits this type of sites in my head. After buying it I got spammed with emails, and had an issue with IP config for my domains; but that was solved fast. As I was going admittedly bit blind into that, I still haven't known at the time that I would need to use a program for uploading things onto a server - but admittedly for me OVHcloud makes some of those things extremely clear. More on other issues I ran into bit later.

I still only had my own old start page at the time though. And I knew it was hot garbage. I started completely from scratch with old variant being open in second tab of a notepad, this time adnotating what i am doing and just reading on the fly if I didn't know something. I took some of formating from there - most notably headers and colours, and barrier graphics - since I drew these in paint.net (I mean those talisman pattern things). It was still dogshit, but it was heading in right direction, especially with all the searching I was doing in the meanwhile, and testing; I ran 86box emulation with windows 98 on my netbook, and every so often I transfered the files there, and launched it in the browser there. For first draft of the start page and home page, I did that twice before uploading it to a server on the same day.

As I went in pretty much blind, I didn't know initially how to exactly upload the domain. Only after few searches, I learned that I need to connect to FTP via FTP client; I chose Filezilla. The rest was decently straight forward; just renaming the file to index.html and that's it...

...well, if not for the fact that the page kept haunting me with stock 'site in construction' page from OVHcloud. I pondered the solution, until I realized that the issue was some loose files above 'www' folder. Remember to pay attention to such small things! Syntax, spelling, et ce tera.

Page was then uploaded, at last, on 4th of march 2026. It worked! I clapped my hands and... got to more work on it. It was still hot pile of mess, and also lacked what i'd describe as flavour, character, yes. I began to then look for images I can use for the page; and then I began to convert them to much smaller sizes, and gifs. I learned about various versions of gif standard, and then I set out onto making sure gifs I would use on this website would be all static, for the sake of just loading on everything and not weighting anything down. I began to try enuring that all the gifs are in gif87a in infranview by batch converting them with transparency turned off and 256 colors only. I would then be content, until... I went below internet explorer 4.0; and realized that browsers like OffByOne and Netscape Navigator 2 display banners wrong; as single cube rather than perfectly looping object till the end of page. I then began to attempt addressing it, in a way that would work in both old and new ones. Initially I expected that posting same tiny gif 200 times would weight the page don significantly and make it load like dogshit under emulators, but no. It actually was perfect solution that made my page almost 100% compatible with html 3.2 (aka. enough for no one to not notice some weird quirks that got in a way from my lack of experience).

Honestly; just because of cool factor.

As I said, i always wanted my own page. As I said, I am quite fond of extremophile pages that load on everything. There's this charming beauty in simplicity, and escape from other things in making of it. I do believe that it is something that we were potentially deprived of as a society by convienience and trapping of social media I use the startpage on this website on both main computer, and in my retro machines and emulation; hence the links are both modern and 'retro' coded.

I recommend trying making something like this for yourself. It's not too hard, information is out there; its all text, spaces and images. There were some cases of people stealing code from such simple sites for themselves - but honestly, why do that in era where you can get something with personality that is *good enough* with something as simple as a page I've mentioned before. People who are too lazy for even that are NGMI in endeavour of estabilishing anything meaningful to themselves and even less so to others. That being said, feel free to repupose whatever I used on this website for yourself, I will feel sorry for you if you do though - it's genuinely very suboptmal, messy, amateurish spaggheti held with ductape and good hope. But please - first and foremost, have fun! Carpe diem! Catch a carp, or something like that.

#1 - 2026-03-07 -  Other entries