No one's asked these, let alone "frequently," lol so this is just an excuse for me to explain things I imagine people might ask. This is my site, let me indulge myself. ¯\_( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉)_/¯

What's so bad about platforms?

Nothing really, they're fun for memes and collating fandom content, but besides the tags available on tumblr, carefully curated by blog owners themselves, there's no real way to find stuff again. Posts, tweets, etc. are lost to the timeline or otherwise algorithm-designed to show us what the platform wants us to see—in order to get us to remain on them longer.

There's very little archive aspect to it. That really amazing thread with so much good content and insight? Unless you bookmarked it in some unique way, you'll never see it again. All the work, writing, graphics, creations you've made, if the platform dies, or you're kicked off for whatever reason—your work is gone.

At the end of the day, we the users are the product. Our outrage is what makes the platforms money. There's nothing wrong with using them, but it's not without cost. Beyond that, there is a great amount of joy in the act of creating your own things, and having control of what you make. And I love seeing people make their own unique web pages and all the creative energy it entails.

Hosts, domains, what?

So basically, every website is hosted on a server somewhere, and the address is the domain you type in. Places like twitter and instagram are hosted on expensive servers because of the high amount of visitor traffic they get globally, but for the rest of us, it's much cheaper to buy space on smaller servers to host our sites.

You can get affordable site hosting for around $10 a month, more or less depending on what service you get. And if you'd rather not pay, there's free hosting available, especially if you don't want to also buy your own unique domain. If you do want to buy a domain, those cost around $10-15 a year to register and subsequently renew.

I recommend just getting an account on neocities.org and playing around with it. Check out the links here for some ideas of what you can do.

Don't know how to code?

That's ok. You can either find free layouts to use from sites that provide it, or else find a host that gives you a page editor. You can also try to learn some basics. To get started, you just need a basic html page, and once you learn more, you can further customize it.

When you don't know how, it seems daunting, but basic web site code isn't necessarily fancy programming. It can just be a static page. Check out Ryan's HTML tutorials and their CSS tuorial to get started. W3Schools also has some nice tutorials. You can also view the source on other people's sites to figure out how things work. Just remember, don't copy; use these to learn, not to steal.