95 reasons for having your own website

to write for oneself
to post quietly
to have a home on the open web
to keep a record of the days 1
to learn how the web works
to make a friend 2 across the world
to have a place to keep memories 3
to learn HTML
to write lists
to keep a daily writing practice
to lean into feeling naive 4
to understand more about your relationship to yourself, to others, or to the world
to write poetry
to use the web as a medium and material5
to ground oneself
to remember
to make a place for conviviality 6
to create the community that you didn't have growing up
to make a photo album
as a place to rage
to recreate your old blogspot or tumblr
as a love letter
to keep <time>
to use social media a little less
to post for oneself
to be fragile
to ground 7 yourself
to collect things and display them on a shelf together
to keep things unfinished and open ended
to contemplate your own mortality
as an activity to do with a friend, "lets make a website together"
out of boredom
to keep notes
as a medium to make a movie
an excuse to go to the park 8
because vibe coding only gets you so far
for the love of the web
to pretend that it's 2010 again
to pretend that it's 2000 again
to become an island
to become an archipelago with your friends
as a form of prayer
to remember that a website is just files & folders
as a form of play
because you want to publish offline
to feel in control
to feel out of control
to stay unstructured
to think through a big life decision
to be your own localhost
to keep an index of colors
to go deep
to feel more alive when interacting with a computer
to publish without social pressure
to keep the like counter at 0
to troll yourself
to make infinite scrolling optional
to bring guest books back
to write for yourself
to show others what the web could be
to world the world
as a wish
to retain the aura 9 of your work
to write your own wikipedia entry
to remove the cynicism 10 from the reason
to stay grounded in the seasons 11
to own what you publish
after reading an essay about what a website could be 12
so that the nerds don't have the only voice on the www
as a form of care 13
because it has very little to do with brutalism 14
because it feels good to be alive 15
as a way to find love
as a form of protest
as a radical statement
to have a clean room
to be in motion
to recharge
to draw
to try out POSSE 16
as a way to go forward by looking back 17
to bring web rings back
to create bridges to other activities 18
to feel young and old at the same time
to archive everything 19 you've ever done
to own your own instagram grid 20
to learn how to juggle 21
because no other medium is a container for images, audio, video, text, time, hyperlinks
it's still a largely unexplored artistic medium
to make a soup 22
to create a scene report
to document a ufo sighting
to walk with
as a way to make a custom home screen for your phone
to publish your music outside the confines of the platforms

… do we need a reason to website?

everythingthathappened.today by Anna Marl.↩︎
websitesite.xyz, by Jisu Lee.↩︎
Memory site by Elliott Cost.↩︎
Naive Weekly, a newsletter by Kristoffer Tjalve.↩︎
The phrase "the web as a medium and material" is credited to Kristoffer Tjalve.↩︎
Extra Practice, a shared studio in Rotterdam.↩︎
home.elliott.computer, Elliott Cost’s homepage.↩︎
One Minute Park by Elliott Cost.↩︎
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935).↩︎
motherfuckingwebsite.com, a manifesto by Barry T. Smith.↩︎
Seasons in Pentameter by Laurel Schwulst, Marie Otsuka, and Tiger Dingsun.↩︎
Laurel Schwulst, "My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?", The Creative Independent.↩︎
A Garden of Care Tools by Gijs de Boer.↩︎
Brutalist Websites, curated by Pascal Deville.↩︎
"Alive Internet Theory", Naive Weekly by Kristoffer Tjalve.↩︎
POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), an IndieWeb model.↩︎
"Go back to go forward", by Elliott Cost.↩︎
Projecting Life by Gijs de Boer and Elliott Cost.↩︎
Everything site by Elliott Cost.↩︎
Camera by Elliott Cost.↩︎
juggling4ever, a juggling how-to page.↩︎
fittererr.com, Sarah Fitterer's website by Gijs de Boer.↩︎