Splash No. 257 - Getting Out of My Own Way
Getting Out of My Own Way
After the HTML meetup I mentioned , I made a website to reflect on the experience — the first one that I’d made for fun in a long time. Despite a longstanding interest in cool websites made for artistic exploration and creativity, I’d only ever really made one site that fit the category — my personal website from 2021. Through that site, I ended up connecting with a lot of cool people and learning more about the world of the poetic web, a movement that imagines the internet as a place for creativity. There are other names for this type of work, like net art, but this is the name I like the best.
Ever since I made that first website and learned more about what was out there in this space, I wanted to contribute more. I would come up with ideas for new websites that I could make, thinking through all of the details of what they could look like and how they might work. Then, I would try to start making them, get stuck after realizing the limitations of my coding skills and never return to the idea again. I wish I could say that this was a one-time thing, but this happened multiple times over the last few years, and an area of interest of mine just floundered.
So, making the simple meetup website ended up being a gamechanger, since I went into it without a plan. I had no real intentions about creating a site other than figuring out a place to put a poem that I had written. Because of that, I decided to keep it simple, just using really basic HTML/CSS, rather than anything fancy. After I finished, I felt inspired to revisit some of my other ideas.
First, I dug up some poems that my writing group had written collaboratively, with each of us taking turns iterating on each other’s poems until we had four versions of four poems to work with. I initially had had a very specific vision in mind for what a website to host this would look like. I imagined that each version could show what was added and removed from the previous version, with the removals crossed out and all. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to do that, I started to question if I needed all the fancy stuff at all. A large part of a poem’s composition is how it sits on a page, and messing with that with my cross-outs and colors would mess with that. So, I shipped a simpler website and was perfectly happy with it. You can see it here.
The next day, I wrote a poem that just came out of my head fully formed. After I wrote it, I realized it had a nice visual metaphor that could be represented online in a clear way and decided to try it out. However, with this one, I avoided getting too married to my ideas about what the website should look like. Instead, I played around with different animations and CSS to see what was possible. I realized the exact animation I wanted could easily become more complicated than I wanted it to, and made something that seemed achievable. Once again, I shipped something simpler and was perfectly happy with it. You can see it here.
After nearly two years of wanting to make some websites, I made three of them in a two-week period. There are different explanations for this, but the main thing was getting out of my own way. I gave up on trying to make something exactly like how it was in my head. I ignored the thought of trying to write really well-written code and instead just followed my instincts and used whatever I could find to make something. With each one, I grew a little more confident about my ability to make interesting things, and a little more annoyed that I took so long to get started. Going forward, I’m excited to work on more projects like these.
After looking at my experience, I want you to ask yourself: are you standing in your own way?
Drops of the Week
ALBUM - Space Heavy by King Krule - new King Krule!!!
POEM - "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert - Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. / It's the same when love comes to an end,
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Talk soon,
Nikhil