not interested in the long explanation? jump to the TL;DR to get the super short version. alternatively, jump to the bottom to see other info, like the tools i use to develop this site, the hardware i develop on, and the screen sizes and browsers i test with.
you have probably noticed by now that my site does not look like most websites in [current year]. actually, it kinda looks like it's from 2002, despite this version of the site being programmed in 2026. why is that?
well, there are several reasons. firstly, and most obvious: i just like how old websites look. something about the slightly janky, simplistic design is charming to me, even if i was too young to remember when major websites still looked like this. this site is my personal site, and i wrote it from scratch, so it matches my aesthetic sensibilities, even if they're unfashionable.
secondly (this one's quite long-winded, so grab a drink and a snack or something): if you look at the section "my tech", or you know me from other parts of the internet, you'll know i have a lot of enthusiasm for old and obsolete computers, and spend a lot of my time using them. in fact, i still own (and, until recently, still used!) an IBM thinkpad from the year 2000, with a pentium III CPU and 256 megabytes of RAM. i have a fascination with running modern software on ancient hardware, far beyond the point of official obsolescence. this extends to browsing the web - a big ask for most computers older than 10 years, and almost impossible for the truly ancient machines.
but! i am a very motivated person, and "almost impossible" does not equal "impossible". i have set my mind to this problem for quite some time now, and i have collected a great deal of tips, tricks, software, and websites that have allowed me to pull this off on hardware that most people gave up on years or decades ago. sure, it's limiting - but i find that limitation fun, a challenge to work around.
this website is the most public culmination of all that work. it contains most of the things one would expect from a normal website, but it also documents a lot of the resources i have discovered to this end (see "old tech user's guide"), and to answer the original question: it is designed to load quickly and be perfectly usable on even the oldest computer i own.
this site is a featherweight - every page, file, and CSS stylesheet on it combined, at time of writing, is smaller than 40 kilobytes. in other words, the entire site could fit onto a 3.5 inch floppy disk... 36 times over. even if the entire site were loaded into RAM, it'd take up so little space, even on that "ancient" thinkpad, that it wouldn't even show up in task manager.
all that, and it's still a motherfucking website. it has some neat looking colors and styles, and a fairly readable layout. you probably wouldn't even have guessed that it's that small unless i told you.
this site is a personal resource for me, and maybe, hopefully, a useful resource for other people like me - a jumping-off point that you can use to discover other cool sites and software that work on your ancient, crappy computer, which itself also works on said crappy computer. if you were stuck with a computer just as old as my pentium III, or even older, you could still hop on this site and get access to everything available here.
oh, and there's a third reason, which i'm a little embarassed to admit. this is the first website i've ever programmed from scratch (the previous version of this site used a much heavier template by petrapixel, and the even older original version is still up on carrd). and i didn't use any LLMs or anything - every line here was written by me, with my idiot hands and idiot brain. writing this site was also a project to learn CSS and git gud at HTML, and i did it using actual learning resources that date back to the late 90s and early 2000s (those are in "other cool sites" if you want them).
so, in summary: this site looks like this because it's designed to work on ancient computers, and be a resource for ancient computer users. it's also because i just like how old websites look, and i'm imitating that. and finally, it's because i had to learn HTML and CSS for this website, so i wasn't very good at it yet when i started.
want the gritty, nerdy details? ask and ye shall receive!
i develop this site in the lightweight IDE geany, using (among other extensions) geany webhelper.
my development machine is considerably newer and more powerful than most of the machines this site is designed for, but still pretty weak by modern standards: it's a netbook from 2013, sporting an extremely sluggish AMD A4-1200 - a dual-core, 1GHz APU. it only has 2 gigabytes of DDR3 memory. it's running devuan linux (ceres openrc for the turbo-nerds) with the trinity desktop environment.
i test this site at 1366 x 768 and (until recently) 1024 x 768 screen resolutions. i test it in the following browsers: webkit (geany webhelper), palemoon, konqueror (trinity version), netsurf, dillo, elinks, lynx. it should be fully usable in the latest versions of all of those browsers. if i'm aware of any shortcomings or glitches on any of my browser targets, i'll probably post about it on the blog.
you'll notice that i don't test in firefox or chromium, because most of my computers can't run those browsers, and frankly, the browsers i test on are way more picky about what features they support, so i can somewhat safely assume that it'll just work on the major browsers if it already works on all my targets.
if you can test it on other (modern) browser engines, and contact me with your results (see "contact me"), it would be much appreciated. i'm especially interested in making sure the site works on haiku's webpositive browser, and on ladybird.
sadly, as of right now, making it compatible with historical/obsolete browsers is not a priority, since my hosting provider (neocities) forces HTTPS, making the site categorically incompatible with old HTTP-only browsers. if you can load the site on your old browser through a proxy, that's cool! however, if you have compatibility issues, i likely won't do anything to fix them. there are other, excellent resources already available for such old browsers.