enchantedsleeper

My general existential "nope" about the passage of time continues, as it's somehow managing to be almost September already 😱 I'm currently on a trip that I've been hugely looking forward to that started on 21st August, so, I'm also delighted that it's finally here! But, you know, I feel conflicted, because the last portion of the year is rushing at me super fast 😅

Still, I have something coming up in September that I'm very excited about. I was chatting to kalloway, who runs the lovely smallweb community, about our mutual desire for a small web-themed event that would give us some motivation to work on our respective archives, and kalloway encouraged me to start something myself if I felt inclined and offered to host it. So, I noodled on some ideas for what a small web event/challenge could look like, and devised Small Web September!

Small Web September is very much in the spirit of March Meta Matters, because I really enjoyed that event and I like the format of having regular prompts and check-in points where people can share their progress, thoughts and challenges. So, over on smallweb, there'll be five check-in points for people to join in, chat about their small web projects, give advice and troubleshoot, and hopefully achieve some cool things! Here's what the schedule will look like:

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In my recent deep fic writer asks post I mentioned that I was embarking on a project to archive all of my created fanworks (no matter how old and cringey) on a personal archive website.

Since I wrote that post, I've spent a good chunk of very fun hours creating and tinkering with the archive site in question, and although I'm far from done, I'm excited enough to share the site so far (enchantedsleeper.space) and write a bit about what creating it has been like. It's going to be on the long side, so buckle in...

How it started

I've been following the trend of "web 1.0" and "indie web" design for a little while now, looking at the fun websites and shrines that people have been making, and wanting to try my hand at making something myself. I didn't really know what to make it about, though. Back in the days of Actual Web 1.0 (which I just caught the tail end of, since I first got online in 2002) I did have a gloriously tacky personal website with a free web building service whose name is sadly lost to the grave of my old AOL bookmarks; but this time around, I wanted to do more with it than just make a Me Website.

I had an idea to make a kind of tech musings site with a little archive of retro "stuff" that my husband and I have hung onto - old gaming consoles, my beloved 1990s Psion - and I'm definitely not ruling that out, because it's still a fun idea, but it was just sort of added to the backburner of "Things I might get around to eventually".

Then I saw melannen 's how-to guide on creating your own personal fic archive, and I thought "Damn, I want to do that." Partly it was seeing the cute things that other people had done with their own fic archives and reading their enthusiasm towards simple, home-made HTML sites. The other part was that earlier this year, I embarked on a "just for fun" project of making a spreadsheet that listed all of my published fanworks, of any kind (mostly fic, but also fanart, fancomics and fanvids). It was fun tracking down my various works and seeing them all laid out, charting my migration from Fanfiction.net to AO3 and from fandom to fandom.

I've never archived them all in one place - I know AO3 exists to archive things, but I've always hesitated to add some of my oldest, cringiest works to my profile there, preferring to let them sit in obscurity at the bottom of my FF.net author page. But a personal fanworks archive felt like the right place to finally have them all in one place - and the idea of choosing my own categorising and tagging conventions was pleasing.

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