Hey, I'm Zinzy! In early August, Manuel invited me to be a guest in his wonderful People & Blogs series. I'm writing this and it's late October now; here I am.
In many ways, I'm a very Dutch person: I like cheese, flowers, milk, and not standing out. I am also Afropean, gay, non-binary, and neurodivergent, which means there's always something about me that stands out. This is why I'm blessed to call Amsterdam home, where everybody is a little different all the time.
I love puzzles, I live with unrelenting curiosity, and I like helping people find what they need. I suppose this is why, despite academic adventures in linguistics and theology, I eventually became a designer by day, and a community builder by chance. One of my favorite projects right now is All Saints Amsterdam, a radically inclusive and very young Episcopal church.
First and foremost, though, somewhere, I'm still the kid who taught herself to build websites at age 11. I am an advocate for an Internet that is open, independent, transparent, cozy, and small.
I like to think of the personal website as one of the corner stones of the Internet. I treat them as rooms, as homes that I get to enter, motherfucking websites that can hopefully stand the test of time, unlike so much of what we see on the Internet today. In many shapes and forms, my personal website has always attempted to fulfill these roles.
Zinzy.website is an all-in-one place, your one-stop shop for learning about me on the Internet. I've tried, in the past, to maintain a personal website and a professional one, but I've always experienced this setup as disingenuous. (This is not to say that you, reader, are disingenuous for having different websites for different parts of your life.) I suppose it stems from my continued nostalgia for a time on the Internet when the personal was professional, and the professional personal.
I taught myself to build websites in the mid 90s. Seeing things appear on a screen felt like looking through a mirror at my hand drawing an object. I could not have been more fascinated. Soon, it became a way to experiment with the art of self-publication. It helped me explore the Internet, interact with others, and look far and wide beyond my little bedroom at home.
As a teenager, I made the first of what I'd consider to be a blog: a collection of dated posts the visualization of which required no manual alteration to be refreshed beyond publishing a post. My blog has known many names in the past, most of which I've forgotten. The parts of it I do remember are archived on zinzy.website/museum, my favorite still being DoYouLikeMyTightSweater.com.
Simone Silvestroni in his own People & Blogs interview summed up quite nicely what happens on my website: "She alters the look, changes typography, structure, navigation so often that following through RSS isn't enough. When I see a new post, I go check the website."
My website is at the mercy of constant pruning, reshaping, reimagining. On our own websites, we have full control over what our words look like; form and content are in perpetual interplay. On zinzy.website, I tell stories with words as much as I do without them. I've tried maintaining a changelog of what I modify on the website, but it was a ridiculous effort. Whenever I feel the itch, I'll get started on a redesign that's usually finished within an hour or two.
I collect fleeting thoughts and oneliners with whatever's ubiquitous, on a sheet of toilet paper if I must. When I feel the itch to turn it into something, I sit down to hover around a first paragraph for a while until I find myself asking: "what am I trying to say here?" Some of the long-form content that I write brushes up against the lyrical essay, so tone and cadence are what I initially focus on. My writing starts because I think something sounds good, and then I spend the rest of the process trying to figure out why.
The majority of my writing sits in the category slices of life: an ode to the mundane ongoingness of my time in the world. It may be an experience I had, something I didn't understand, something that irked me, media I consumed, something I value, an idea I have, what I'm up to now. It's what I like to see on personal sites, and it's my rejection of the design industry's unwritten rule that every designer should try to be a thought leader. I'm not just a designer, and my website reflects that.
One of the reasons it took me three months (sorry Manuel!) to answer a simple set of questions is that I returned from a transformative trip and found myself rethinking what I was actually doing with my life, which is to say what I was doing with my website. Lately, I've been struggling even more with performativity and self-presentational techniques common amongst IT professionals. Turning my front page into a photo blog has helped me return to the small and simple.
I web master best in public togetherness that honors how hell is other people. I love a good coffee place: me, a screen, and people around me who leave me alone. Noise-cancelling headphones with an endless Spotify loop of those ridiculous lo-fi instrumental beats that underscore the Plan with Me garbage I watch on YouTube. Website tinkering usually happens on Saturday morning at our local Coffee Company.
My writing environment depends on the content I'm writing. Since it usually accompanies a certain level of unrest, I do it wherever I find myself: at work during my lunch break, at home in the kitchen, on the tram. Early-stage writing happens anywhere, editing always happens in the same place.
When I feel a piece is almost there, I move to Visual Studio Code and fire up my localhost, so that I can see what it looks like in the browser. I often run my localhost over my IP address so that I can see it on my smartphone as well. To iron out any typos or mistakes, I listen to a blog post with Speechify (referral link), my text-to-speech software of choice. I think the most profound part of my writing happens when I look at it in the browser.
I build my website with Hugo, it lives in Github, and is served through Netlify. My domains have been with bHosted, a tiny Dutch company, since the early 2000s.
On touch devices, I like Working Copy, and on my machines I use Visual Studio Code. It's important to me that what I put on the Internet begins on my website, and because the Micropub standard and I aren't the best of friends, I do enjoy the iOS shortcuts that let me post notes and photos to my website in just a few seconds.
I use CSS framework Tailwind for styling purposes; not because my website needs it, but because it helps me collaborate with engineers on my team. I can't believe we ever wrote vanilla CSS.
I'll answer this by telling you about my most important Internet-related values and how I acquired them.
I had to look up the one expense my website requires: a domain at 40 euros per year. I don't monetize my website, even though there's a "buy me coffee" link hidden on some page somewhere. The websites I most like to visit are personal websites created for the sheer gratification of having brought something personal to the Internet. The moment a personal website turns into a fulltime job, I've found I tend to lose the reason for coming there. I don't spend money on anybody else's blog, but I've subscribed to a handful of Patreon tiers of people who are, for example, independent researchers who happen to also have a website. Andy Matuschak is a good example of this.
I'm a visual thinker (my partner calls me a super recognizer), and websites are best in their natural state where I can see them for what they are. I can't even find enjoyment in using an RSS reader, so I just have a long list of websites I like on my Bookmarks page. I don't really care if you published a new post. Sometimes I just want to be around you for a bit. Top of my head, three of my favorites include eatock.com, matthewsmith.website, and patrickrhone.net for the way they tell me about their makers, and the surprises I encounter there.
One thing that makes me not like other girls is that I have a bad day if the Wayback Machine is down. Sure, it's awesome that Kottke is still around making "fine hypertext products since 1998", but remember those blue lines from 2013?! And remember that very naughty 1095-day photo project that Naughty James completed in 2006? Whatever happened to that guy?! And what about Heather Champ's blog, with those Polaroids that were the last known to man at the time? When I think of it, the fact that some genius thought to archive the internet as early as he did, I'm overcome with gratitude and humility.
Okay, so the previous paragraph made me so nostalgic that "who do you think I should be interviewing next" only elicits a disappointing response. I miss Aaron Swarts. I want to know what he'd think about the Internet today, what he'd be writing about, what his website would look like. (Isn't is sad that the link under his name doesn't even have https yet? Where does time go?) I miss Dooce and the candor, wit, and vulnerability with which she welcomed the Internet. I struggle with how I learned so much about her, and how I'll still never know what she was thinking and feeling in her last moments in the world.
On a happier note, I want to hear from Patrick Rhone, Derek Powazek, from Maggie Mason. The bloggers from before responsiveness. People who were publishing slices of their lives so that we can publish slices of our lives. What's it like to still have a personal website today? Do you miss the good old days? How has your website changed over time? How has the Internet changed for you?
To everyone taking it upon themselves to find ways, continuously, to share parts of who they actually are on the Internet for everyone to see, unfiltered: thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. I feel this thing of ours is a rare dialect at risk of extinction.
To everyone not reading this because they're on some street corner balancing their phone on a bench so they can record a poorly performed dance for TikTok: no.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。