personal sites

[helenic]

Today, with the help of romauld, who is now kindly hosting me, I bought two new domains: fox-fires.org and wax-and-wane.org. (No links because, as yet, no content.) art-fag.net expired last week (which is why all my links are broken) because I tried to renew it, but couldn't remember my password, and the password email I requested never arrived. That domain has now been Evilled by my old registrar; that is, they've made it unusable for a year unless I pay them £200 to renew it because I didn't renew it before it expired. I hadn't updated the site since last April in any case, and I've had it for over four years, so. Time for something new. Wax-and-wane because the moon is significant for me, for various reasons, because it has overtones of transience and flux and I'm in a state of perpetual moodswing, but at the same time never really feeling like I change. It has various attractive symbolisms, the phrase is pleasing, it's a Cocteau Twins song. I think I'm going to use it for my art, semi-professionally. Fox-fires is a contraction of another Cocteau Twins song (what can I say; they have very pleasing lyrics, and all the other things I came up with were taken), "Frou-frou foxes in midsummer fires". It is also a cunning inversion of PhyrePhoxx, which was my first ever username on Yahoo in about 1996.

It's all got me thinking about websites again. The personal site is a strange genre. Perhaps it's just the ones I've seen, but it seems to be that they are all owned by photography students from Scandinavia, and the layouts are always the same: white page, large rectangular photograph (of the edge of a building, or trees, or someone's legs, usually) with links in a random serif font underneath the picture. Or else they're scrapbook style with scannings-in and handwriting and things cut out of magazines. I'm not trying to be insulting - a lot of them are very well executed and very aesthetically pleasing - but there's no denying the extent to which these things follow trends. I know I've been guilty of it as well, probably more than all the efforts I've (obliquely) described above. But there's something simultaneously depressing and compelling about it, like badly-written escapist fantasy novels. On one level they are pleasing, an enjoyable waste of time, and "inspiring" in the sense of giving you dead-end ideas that can't be developed further, or aesthetic but largely meaningless lyricism, or an idea you'd seen somewhere before but had forgotten. No real change, nothing really new or affecting, but a small kind of nostalgia. Taking comfort in the familiar. Moods you've already had, that sort of thing.

I used to be a bit addicted to these sort of sites, but I haven't browsed the usual suspects in almost a year now, just as I'd left my own domain untouched for so long I'd almost forgotten I had it, and largely used the space for storing livejournal images. I do want to have an online presence again (why? I don't know; suggestions on a postcard plz) but I'm at a bit of a loss about what, precisely, to do with it. I've always wavered between actually putting my abortive and talent-lacking creative endeavours online in the hope of getting vapid compliments, and between being defensively abstract and just putting up a string of paragraphs that chronicle my preoccupations at the time, and try to articulate some of my thinking about things like identity and environment. I want to change tack, but am unsure how, so because this is livejournal I'll ask your opinion rather than, you know, being original and thinking for myself.



[Poll #428405]

Comments

[aletharch.livejournal.com]

What I feel about the issue of similar layouts is that webdesign is a very snobbish art form. One has to learn several new computer languages in order even to make the first steps (I'm just starting cascading style sheets), and it's very useful that pre-designed layouts exist. I'm less concerned about similarity of layout than I am of the artistic/creative/though-provoking merits of the site's content. In other words, the only thing I hate are sites started for no reason other than "all my friends have one, LOL".

[libellum.livejournal.com]

yes yes yes. That's exactly what I was trying to say in my entry. There's a huge divide between people who see personal websites as fun and interesting, and people who see them as an art form. Can they ever be an artform? if so, how much does this have to do with content? can they be good art and also interesting personal sites?

I think my conflict is arising from my desire to have both an interesting, informative, useful and amusing personal website, and also to have a website that is a piece of art. I suppose if the two aren't actually compatible, I have two domains now: I could do both!

[mijra.livejournal.com]

I'd say yes, the two are compatible, but the compatibility sometimes is detrimental to the content. Structure determines what sort of content makes sense; content should, in the ideal world, determine what sort of (artistic/design) structure you give your site. I'm not sure if I'd consider a website that is first and foremost a piece of art to be a personal website. To me, at that point, it's just art.

As far as websites themselves are concerned, I'm very... text-oriented. And humor--amusement--is always important.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I suppose I'm torn because I like the simple, elegant, aesthetic sites. I'm trying to think of examples of sites I like pretty much entirely for design. Hmmm. Well, undreaming.net is good because of all the little corners, but mainly it's the unusual layouts and good graphics. sherbetmassacre.net I like, again, for the unusual design - she always has long screens, and scanned bits, and (I think) Ema may have been the one to start several of the trends. stellamara.net is just stunning. most of them have content that is either artistic, or snippets of text - nothing funny, or thought-provoking, just beautiful. But I *do* have things to say and I'm a good essayist and rhetorician even if I can't write fiction, and it's combining what I want to say with my desire to do elegant and beautiful design, which I believe I have the skills for... but they're very different genres. Hmm. I'm sure I'll work something out :)