Why did it take me over two years to publish a personal website?

And all I came up with was this lousy HTML page.

I recently came across the idea of "working with the garage door up" as an analogy for how creatives can show up on the internet. Instead of only showing up on Twitter to announce finished work, it's an invitation to think out loud and show the process and work in real-time. This Substack is part of me showing my work process, and working with the garage door open is the vibe that enabled me to finally publish my website.

My online presence as an artist started on Instagram in 2019 and expanded to Twitter during the NFT boom of 2021. I added a "Linktree" to my social media bios, claimed a y.at and in the meantime, the pressure to have a dedicated website kept growing. As a result publishing a website has been at the top of my task list for over two years, but I kept postponing it.

Despite using code as one of my mediums to make my art, I don't consider myself a web developer. Foremost because I don't want to be a web developer, but I do care about website design. I think websites are a beautiful interactive way to convey ideas, feelings, personalities, aesthetics, poetics, values, and so much more. Therefore, I had built up the idea that a personal website demanded ultimate perfection from an artist using the browser to make art. The perfect breeding ground for unproductive procrastination.

For me, procrastination predominantly comes from a fear of failure. The unconscious reasoning is that if we postpone something to the last moment and end up "failing," we can always blame not having had enough time; it wasn't actually you who failed. So, if you never publish your website, you can never fail.

In the meantime, you can start collecting a long list of websites that you like and get completely caught up in the design and aesthetic questions of your website. I kept going back and forth on different platforms that allow you to publish a website and trying out a lot of different templates. Knowing that none of them would be right, because I wanted to code the website myself, but it kept me busy and feel like I was working on it.

Only a few months ago, I finally decided to address the issue and get serious about publishing something. I figured I should stop getting stuck on the design and work on the content. Whatever the design would be, the content needed to be there. It still wasn't easy, but the shift in focus enabled me to open up a Google doc and start writing. Instead of opening many tabs, closing them again, and calling it a day, I was producing something.

After finishing the document, it gathered dust for a little while until I published my previous post and decided I had to apply The Cult of Done to this problem. I used "This Is Still A Motherfucking Website" (which is a riff of “This is a motherfucking website”) as a template and put the whole thing together in a day. I've accepted it's not finished yet, but I have ported my writing over to HTML and I'm working with the door open. There is still a list of things I want to add, edit, improve, etc., and that list will grow and shrink over time but never reach 0.   

I've always had a soft spot for simple HTML websites; perhaps it is nostalgia because I grew up on the internet of the late 90s and early 00s. There is a poetic honesty and simplicity to them that I appreciate. This is the first time I have done anything with HTML beyond what is required for a p5.js sketch. I wish I had started with it earlier and I still don’t want to be a web developer but I'm excited to mess with it more.

Did you enjoy reading this? Consider subscribing. I might write more in the future. I have no clear path for this.