.1 - Hello, welcome and why?

2024-12-26

Uhm... hello? Is this thing on?

Well it seems like you made it to my blog, somehow, uhm... welcome... since this is my first post here it will serve as an introduction of sorts.

So, who am I?

My name is Sérgio Pereira, pleased to have you browsing around my website, I'm from Portugal so my native language is Portuguese, but as you might have guessed I also speak english (even though it is far from perfect), and sometimes French (even farther from perfect). So there might be some mistakes or things that are written in weird ways in this website, if you find some feel free to shoot me an email at webmaster@sergioedup.com or, when I make it available, create an issue on the github of this website.

And why am I creating this website?

"You could surely just share whatever you want to share here on other already existing social platforms!" you might be saying

Well reason for the creation of this website requires a bit more of history about myself, I was born in 2001, just before the end of the web 1.0 and beginning of the web 2.0, while I didn't get to experience the early web first hand I had the opportunity to browse it's dying remains, by the time I was 7 years old I got my actual first computer, a Magalhães (it was part of one, of many, government projects was created to teach people how to use computers) by then I was already fairly familiar with how to use a computer since my older brother had been teaching me on his desktop, but one of the many things that that computer sparked in me was the curiosity for how they actually do what they do and how I could tell them what I wanted them to do, that later lead me to take a computer programming course in school. One other thing that that computer brought with it for me was nearly unlimited and entirely unrestricted access to the internet (I'm still debating wether that was a good or bad thing), parents back then didn't really understand the internet, they knew it was great for learning, but most of them were pretty clueless to the bad things that could and did happen in it, but that is not really the point, the point is that I spent so much of my life online that I often say that I grew on the Internet.

And even though by 2008 the old web was mostly replaced by the more modern web 2.0, there was still boundless hope and possibilities for what it could become and what we would be able to do with it. What I don't think anybody expected was for it to become the corporate hellhole that it is today, where you movements are tracked everywhere you go, where every site exists with the sole purpose of making money, and were you are spoonfed mind-numbing content by some black box algorithm just to keep you on these platforms. And I, like many others, got to see it happen first hand, front row seats to watch our home town burn down and be replaced with a bunch of soulless corporate offices...

And up until very recently I just accepted that to be the new reality of the web, an homogenized corporate hellscape were everything and everyone is trying to profit of you and your attention. I had accepted that the old web was dead and not coming back, I even tried to join in a couple of times, I have had an account on pretty much every social platform out there, I even tried to make my own content and publish it on YouTube a couple of times, and every single one of those attempts ended the same way, with a lot of stress and anxiety, the constant comparison of myself with others and trying to make me stand out wile also relatable so that more people come see what I have to show, and the constant pressure from society and these platforms to be successful (whatever that meant). With all of those attempts I ended up closing myself up more and more. The most recent of those attempts was just about a year ago, at the start of 2024, and when I gave up I just convinced myself that it wasn't for me.

So I kept on consuming content online, always unhappy with both the current situation of the internet and my own mental well being, I thought about creating a little website for myself a couple of times since I already owned a domain but never really knew where to start or what to do with it. "It wont fit in to the current landscape and people wont like it", that's what I told myself. That is until I found a youtube channel that goes by the name "Reject Convenience" with a video about cookies , the kind that we use on web browsers to store data not the ones you eat, a really nice video talking about the history of the cookie and it's uses , one of them, and probably the biggest, was tracking the users for targeted advertisements, and by the end of the video he encouraged us to make our own websites, to show how unhappy we are with the current web situation by creating a space of our own devoid of tracking, ads and corporate greed, a space where we can express ourselves without being forced into these hundreds of little boxes and same-looking webpages. The whole thing resonated a lot with me, and I recommend that you give it a watch too, so I took a look at this guy's website and it felt different, it was a really simple while staying unique, and most importantly it definitely was not something I was expecting to see on the modern web where almost all websites follow one of a couple of templates, and there was this one weird thing at the bottom of the home page, a "webring" that goes by "sillyring" (which you might have noticed at the bottom of my page too), now I know that a web ring is essentially a circular collection of websites but at the time I had never heard of a webring so I clicked it, and was very surprised to see links to more personal and unique webpages of like-minded people, and each page pointed to even more pages, I was sucked in, something that had not happen since the modern social media sites took over, I was surfing the web, I must have crossed at least 100 pages, each of them unique and with something special to give us, and for the first time in nearly two decades I felt like I was back home, meeting with a long forgotten friend that had spent all this time waiting for my return. I actually cried a bit. And am crying again as I write this.

So what is this website's purpose?

After spending a couple of hours browsing these websites and what they had to offer it was clear to me what I wanted, I just want a place that I can call my own on the web to share my stuff, be it my toughs and feelings, little pieces of software I make every once in a while or photos of trips and actual physical projects that I make. This is what this website is, a no-bullshit home for myself on the web, no tracking, no ads, no worrying about pleasing some sort of algorithm, no likes or view counters, just 100% me and my creations.

Oh and it gives me entire control of how the page looks and and 100% creative freedom so I can do stuff like this:

I bet you have not seen one of those since Facebook took over! Anyway,

That's not to say that I will stop using other platforms, hosting some types of content ist still pretty annoying so I'll let them handle it for me (I'll talk more about it as I see fit), but this website will become my main way of sharing what I like and what I do. And all of it powered by my messy spaghetti code and basic (but steadily improving) artistic skills. It sure as hell is not perfect (whatever you might define as perfect), but it is MY imperfect little home on the web.

Well, that's about it for now, I know that my writing is a bit messy but I really have not taken the time to write anything longer than a sentence since I finished school and my mind is all over the place right now, but this will surely improve with practice :)

I hope to see you again soon,
- the webmaster, Sérgio