After 22 months, I've finally laid some groundwork to flesh this modest blog back into something more comprehensive and explorable. It's still modest in some respects, but from my perspective, it's elegant, well-considered, and maintainable – fruits of my many hundreds of quiet hours of thinking and tinkering.

Anyone who visited the site in its earlier years will recognize this step as at attempt to reproduce its original elements. But at the time, those were cobbled together: I was familiar with web standards from habit, but hadn't grasped the originating history of the web or HTTP. Because it lay beyond the limits of what I knew, I wrote blog entries into LiveJournal and siphoned them in through a PHP script I found and couldn't begin to understand. I implemented continuous ambient music by hiding it in an invisible "frame set," which, even if it were still supported, was never meant to be used that way. That's what enthusiasm gets an amateur.

Well, time has passed. The web's standards have improved, and so have mine. Now, pretty much every drop of code (including the blog!) came from my keyboard. The main element that doesn't come directly from me is the font, and I intend to attribute such things in the credits.

As you might gather, a good deal of philosophy underpins this version. I love the lost virtues, simplicity, and user-centrism of the early web, but others who uttered those words would settle for nothing less (or rather, more) than a site starkly free of JavaScript, leaving no path to content but lightweight page reloads. Contrastingly, I've decided that the web is a platform, "apps" can run on this platform, and JavaScript is the language in which they're written, so that's the approach I've taken. (If you want, you can turn off JavaScript and see what happens; it's not much, but it's friendlier than the blank pages you'd find on many of the web's most popular sites.) And for anyone who finds all this offensive but still cares to hear from me, I've been testing a subscribable feed of the blog for some time – another format I love.

The choice to lean into JavaScript does not mean I've decided to get hacky and user-hostile. The user-centric character of the early web has remained my guide through all of this. The ambient music I mentioned? That can now play continuously from your arrival to your departure, if you care for it, without workarounds of any kind. Thanks to the "web app" approach, your entire visit is essentially one page load, followed only by incremental data fetches when needed – though, to recall "lightweight," most of the site is downloaded in one request and allowed to cache itself when you arrive, taking up well under 100 kilobytes. The lovely starscape (previously 72 kilobytes alone) now takes under ten. I'm pretty sure the site would blaze even over a dial-up modem.

Rather than cling to those aforementioned early implementations of early HTML, I've tried to note the standards and features which have evolved into something sensible and simple, and embrace those, to make something like what I think a modern version of an early web home should be, if they had remained popular. Despite the lack of full page refreshes, your browser's "back" button can still be used to navigate. The URL should update as expected while doing it, and the addressed can be copied and shared as usual. If you hide the menu or turn on the music, that state should be remembered for next time. If you turn off auto-play in your browser settings, that should be respected too. Everything's compatible with lots of screen sizes. And as though anyone should need to say this: nothing you interact with here has anything to do with tracking you around the rest of the web. (Lots of small sites at least use Google Analytics – not this one.) And so on.

If you find anything that seems weird or broken, or you're aware of any kind of error, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know.

A lot of time and effort to me, and one of the most fulfilling activities I've undertaken in recent years. A sample of how I think the web should be. And I look forward to carrying on.