neighborhood #1 (tunnels)
This month's new page is the neighborhood, a tribute to my favorite personal websites. I'm nowhere near finished with it, as I have many favorites.
The layout is my answer to two questions I've been mulling over for a while:
- What would a responsive ASCII art scene look like?
- How do I add more context to my button wall, without putting the buttons in a boring table?
For the first part, I knew the text art would have to be modular. Each piece could be no wider than a phone screen, and they'd all need to make sense both when placed side by side and when stacked on top of each other. I didn't really have a clear vision of what the modules would actually be, until I merged the idea with the second question. What if I took the homepage metaphor literally, and each button was placed in its own text art home, displayed in a little text art neighborhood?
The initial draft had signs next to each house with corresponding site URL. The signs would have been easy to update, but they looked too much like "for sale" signs and made the resulting neighborhood look abandoned. Horrible vibes all around. To give the page life, each house needed unique text art representing the site it linked to. So far, I've included some things you'd find in a neighborhood (a church, a power line) and some you might not (a ship, a ghost, a hog). This slows me down when adding new sites, but it's much more rewarding.
Of course, right after putting the page online, I noticed another issue. It looked too much like suburban sprawl! Offline, moving from a suburb to a walkable neighborhood changed my life significantly for the better, yet here I was making an recreation of suburban development on my website. Horrible vibes, again! This neighborhood needed a train. It needed bus stops. The obvious analogy for a bus line is a webring, but I hadn't joined any webrings. They're often broken and hard to navigate, and, if I can be honest here, I've avoided joining webrings because I don't like the idea of having a link on my site that I have no control over. What if the person who joins after you has a site that you don't like very much? But then, isn't that the same sort of logic that keeps people driving cars instead of taking the bus? I needed to get over it, so, finally, I've joined some webrings. I'm giving up a little control so my site can be a better part of the community.
You may argue that I'm taking the metaphor too literally, but I disagree. I think I can push it a little further. If each homepage is a single family home, what would multifamily housing look like? (Maybe public access unix systems?) What is the personal web equivalent of a grocery store? How do you add a bike lane?