I miss a version of the internet that felt less certain about what every page was for.
That is a personal memory, not a historical verdict. The earlier internet was not universally kinder, more accessible or more interesting. Plenty of it was slow, confusing and badly designed. I do not want to exchange one simplified story for another.
What I miss is the feeling of arriving somewhere shaped by a person before it was shaped by a format. A page might contain a reading list, a strange colour choice, a half-finished experiment and a link to something the owner loved. It did not always know whether it was a portfolio, a notebook or a shelf. That uncertainty could feel generous.
A place rather than a pitch
Feeds are useful. They help work travel, make discovery easier and allow conversations that would otherwise never happen. I use them. But a feed asks each thing to enter the same current: sized, timed and interpreted beside everything else competing for attention.
A personal website can behave differently. It can be slower to update. It can keep an old project beside a new prayer, or place a song near a design note because both mattered in the same month. It can make room for context without needing every page to perform immediately.
That is part of why I am building Dearly Debbie. I wanted a small corner of the internet that was not only a professional summary. The About room can hold the things I care about. The Build room can show projects at different stages without inventing polished endings. These letters can hold a thought long enough for it to become more than a caption.
Ownership as attention
“Owning” a corner of the internet can sound more grand than I mean it. I do not mean complete independence from platforms, infrastructure or changing technology. This site is still built with tools made by other people and hosted on someone else’s servers.
I mean choosing the arrangement. Deciding what belongs together, what stays quiet, what remains visible after the week has passed, and what never needed publishing at all.
That kind of ownership is really a form of attention. It asks me to maintain a place rather than continuously fill a channel. It also gives visitors a way to understand the relationships between my faith, design work, cultural interests and unfinished ideas without forcing all of them into one label.
The internet does not need to return to an imagined past for personal websites to matter. We can make new places now: clear enough to navigate, particular enough to remember, and useful even when they are not constantly announcing themselves.