Starting to own something again

I rebuilt a personal website because I don't want to participate in social media and haven't for a number of years now. When I say social media, I mean things like Facebook, Instagram and the like. I am still on listing services like Letterboxd and Strava because I am still a data nerd at heart and I don't want to have to do the hard work for storing all of this in some custom solution.

It has been a long time since I have felt that my data is mine and going through this exercise has made it feel like the web used to feel. It shouldn't feel revelatory to be able to show the things that matter to you in one place, but it sort of does. When I really liked building things on the web, everyone was still figuring it out and excited to show what they were about. There was no frame that you didn't really have control of - if you wanted to put something on your website, you generally had to figure out how to do it yourself.

I'm not trying to sound like an old man shouting from my porch, but this feels like the web again. I hope that I will do a better job of keeping this current and it will further inspire me to capture the things that interest me. Who knows, but it is mine, as much as anything is.