When I was a kid, I always found it annoying how both my English and Ukrainian language teachers made us capitalize the word "Internet". Sure, I understood what proper nouns were, but something about it always felt off. Back then, the Internet didn't feel like a product to me, it was simply a place to be in, to play games in, to get information from.

I'll be fair, I came upon the Internet much later than most of you reading this. The whole country did. Around 2010, we got the first PC that I can remember¹ ever using. It had a very basic, beat up, black case and a simple LCD display on an absurdly wide base. I only have vague memories of using Windows XP on it, but I think it mostly chugged along with Windows 7 by the time I was in school. It Ship-of-Theseus'd along all the way to present day, retaining the black, slightly bent case, but having every single component inside (and outside) switched with another. It's now my Mom's home PC, which, ironically, still uses Windows 7 to this day.²

All that to say: I don't remember Web 1.0, and I am barely aware of what Web 2.0 looked like, since back then all I cared about were good grades, why nobody seemed to like me,³ and playing Half-Life 2 for the 30th time again.⁴ By the time I got into tech, the abomination that Web 3.0 is was already steamrolling its way across the Internet, and all the enclaves of The Old Web™ have managed to elude me, since at most I was only interested in watching Youtube and getting my ass kicked in Team Fortress 2.

Now, I don't wanna be a prude and say "Everything New Bad" but when's the last time you were genuinely excited about something online? It's always drama this, cancelled celebrity that, layoffs here, mergers there, companies slowly enshittifying the world while going

CHECK OUT OUR NEW AI MODEL

SEE MASS ATROCITIES IN REAL TIME

BUY

BUY

BUY

MORE

MORE

MORE

You get the point. I'm tired of seeing the Internet as a place where someone always tries to sell me something. I don't want AI to do my hobbies for me. I don't want to package my thoughts into a 280 character blob that people will ask Grok to explain to them. I want to swim out as far away as I can from this garbage patch, raise my own island from the ocean floor, plant a flag and say "This is mine. You can't touch this."

And that's how Marceline's Coven was born.

Though technically concieved of in a bizzare combination of my friend starting their own blog (you'll notice a lot of parallels between their first post and mine. Great thighs twerk alike, or something.) and suddenly getting an inspiration for a short story in the gym and not having any real existing place to put it on, but the end result is the same. I don't want to pay extra for something that was the default option 10 years ago. I simply want to do.

I already bought this domain almost a year ago and tried to self-host a simple page, but failed miserably due to the combination of my ISP being shit and the router being shit. Luckily, a friend of mine stepped up and offered to host it on her own server, which was very pawesome of her. Back then, this is what the website looked like this:

A single page with WordArt text saying that the website is not done yet with a script randomly selecting a background image every time you refreshed the page. Some remnants of this first prototype can still be seen in this website's 404 page, have fun finding it!

The months went on, and gradually I forgot I even owned the website at all. But then, having been struck by inspiration and a particularly quirky bee, I needed to evaluate all the options available to me.

Twitter

No.⁵

Tumblr

Ah, Tumblr. The website that taught me that social media didn't have to absolutely suck balls and that your thoughts don't have to be contained to a single paragraph with a limit of 4 images. The layout is confusing, and so are the users, but it is a very cozy place to post about your day-to-day life, random thoughts you have, or your art, be it writing, drawing, cinematography or birdwatching. Still, I don't think it's the right place for something like this. While your Tumblr page is very customizable, with custom theming options that would make Elon fall into a coma, I feel it's much more focused on reblogging someone elses posts than making your own. Every time I log onto Tumblr I can't resist reblogging every single post I see, since the algorithm is just that good (for me, at least), inevitably burying all of my own posts beneath a pile of Deltarune fanart. Aside from the issues of privacy and everything else that comes with being tied to The Big Web, I quite like it.

If you just want a healthier alternative to Twitter, try Tumblr! It even starts with a T, to heighten your immersion. The ads are more in-your-face, but at least there's no porn bots. Anymore.

Bear Blog

Bear Blog (stylized as ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear) is a free minimalist blogging platform with no trackers, distractions or ads. The basic option is free, and by all means, if you just wish to start a simple blog to air your thoughts out, ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear is by far the best option, and it's also what the first friend I mentioned uses for their blog. Granted, if you wish to customize your pages further (like being able to post images or have a custom domain), you need to upgrade to a paid plan, but even then-- it's not that expensive. $6 a month is cheap as hell. $49 a year (with 4 months free) is even better, and if you have long-term plans, you can splurge on the $189 one-off upgrade and own the premium version forever.

AND they were awesome enough to offer me a discount on the upgrade page when they detected that I was from Ukraine!

I can't just repeat everything the website stands for here, so by all means, visit their page that I've linked above and decide for yourself. The only reason I decided to not use ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear is because I didn't want my website to be so... clean. So sterile. No shade to anyone that does, minimalism is nice when it's done right, but I wanted my website to have this raw energy to it. I think I managed that quite nicely.

WordPress

WordPress is a staple of making your own website if you don't much care for all that coding nonsense. Pick a template, customize it in your browser, and Bob's your uncle, you got your own website up and running. It's not limited to just blogs, as you can set your page up to do just about anything, provided you have the time to customize it. The basic plan is quite cheap, though I'll be honest, I never tried WordPress myself. I've heard a lot about it, especially while coding this website, but it was never an attractive option for me. I think I'd use it if I somehow failed to create this website myself. Thank God that never happened!

Neocities

Neocities is the closest already available option to what I wanted my website to look and feel like. You can write your own static website in HTML right in the browser, with file/image hosting, lots of developer options, zero ads, no AI training, fast loading times, and a thriving community, for absolutely free! My own website takes great inspiration from Neocities, and the overall layout is greatly inspired by several websites hosted on there.

Bottom line? Try Neocities. At worst you'll end up participating in an extremely friendly community of fellow old web enjoyers, and at best, you might end up making something that'll be seen by thousands of people out there. Someday you might even inspire someone like me to do the same, and the wheel of creativity will continue turning.

Rawdogging it

Alright. You've reached this far, either because none of the options above interest you enough, or you don't even care about starting your own website/blog and just wanna finish reading this post in its entirety. Congratulations! Have a cookie. 🍪

The first thing I ever made for this website was this mockup:

Compare it to the homepage as it is today and you'll find some striking similarities!

Afterwards I decided on the tool to test and develop the website locally: XAMPP! It really is a neat system, combining an Apache server to run PHP and a MySQL server to run... MySQL. All available from localhost. I'd do the tool more justice, but the margins of this post are too narrow to contain it.

The development of the homepage took about 3 days, with me slacking off my actual job (C++ development) to play around with the Mystical Moon Ant Eater and PHP scripts. Oh yeah, as of the writing of this post, there is not a single line of JavaScript code on this website. Everything is pure HTML, CSS and PHP. Not that there's anything wrong with JavaScript, I just didn't have a need to include it in an otherwise static⁶ website.

I gathered a bunch of funny gifs, blinkies, buttons and stamps from various websites⁷ and neatly (kind of) arranged them at the bottom of the page, tinkered with CSS to make the website logo pop, and made a little script that generates Minecraft-like splash texts on every page refresh. Since I was already using Namecheap for my domain, I decided to use them for hosting, too. It was a little confusing to set up initially, but I got it in the end. Doing some back of the envelope calculations, it costs me $3.34 a month to maintain in perpetuity. And since I own all the source code, I can always move it elsewhere.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the 4th day.

After that, the logical choice was to work on the blog part of my blog. I debated on whether or not I needed to set up a proper database for this, but decided that I had to do it. For the future of the Coven. And though I swore more than once trying to get the code that worked perfectly on my XAMPP setup to play nice over on the Namecheap server, it ended up working in the end. In fact, I spent far more time getting the post formatter to work properly than setting up the database.

Since I'm a lazy eepie girlie I have no time to write my blog posts in pure HTML, so I decided to use Markdown, a widely supported markup language with many PHP scripts that convert it to useable HTML. I ended up gravitating towars Parsedown and Parsedown Extra to support some less-used Markdown features.⁸

Parsedown is still an amazing tool, and if you ever set out to do something like this of your own, check it out!

After some tweaking to individual parts of a post, setting up a template and script that allows me to just put the raw markdown files into a directory and have the server generate finished pages automatically, and testing all the parts of it combined (we always test in prod here), I can finally sit down, breathe out, and say:

I can finally own the Internet again.

I hope you enjoyed reading this little piece as much as I enjoyed writing it. See you around, friend.