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Web Dev Survey

Hello!

I am binnie mf, also known as the artist Of Reverence, representing Media Creation for Dogs. Today, I have a treat for you: I have sent out a questionnaire to quite a few people who have personal websites, and today, 2026-10-29, I present to you interviews with four other webmasters of their own personal websites. I believe they need no introduction. I am tired and you have been put here on this earth with eyes to read, ears to hear, and/or fingers to click.

TBA: https://flamedfury.com/ - flamed has responded that he will answer the questions, but has yet to answer them, and i trust him at his word. i would be quite surprised if he doesn’t get back to me in the next ~6 months and even if it’s 6 months later as you read this and flamed is missing, i will advise you to bet on that being my mistake rather than his.

  • https://ouroboros.cafe/
    • ouro … i respect the work they do. i am particularly fond of their website’s license, even if i prefer CC BY-SA myself.

1. when did you first begin working on your personal site?

mark: My website was created in February of 2023. The site’s main purpose was to log repairs done to my newly acquired Sega Versus City, and it’s secondary purpose was to pass time on the night shift. New posts and minor layout revisions were frequent because I needed to do something to stay awake.

n0: neocities tells me i created my site in 2016, but I didn’t start working on it properly until 2022 or so

ouro: Late August of 2021 is when I started writing the earliest instance of the site as it exists now, though I only published it in mid-September. A few of the pieces of writing on there existed before that.

jlc: This website (cybersavior) was started…. must have been late 2019 or early 2020. first version of /this/ site was running the 100r wiki Oscean back when it was a plan9 c program rather than a uxn program. I think work started in 2022 on muffet which used the same ndtl back-end for the most part. but allowed me a lot more flexibility in how things are managed.

2. have you done much web dev outside of that site? please share

n0: it feels a bit presumptuous to claim I’m doing “webdev”, but I do also run https://denpa-chan.org

ouro: Not really. I’ve done minor work on a site associated with my job that I will not disclose, though I was by no means the primary contributor and this was years after I made the site.

mark: I’ve been making websites for a long time, but maerk.xyz is the first good one. When I was a kid, I made tons of empty sites through webs.com. Finally learning HTML when I was 18 years old resulted in a few barely styled blogs, but nothing stuck around for long. Since creating maerk.xyz, I have made a few more:

  • An art gallery for the maerk.xyz mascot, Naomi. I made the site because most of my drawings of her were just rotting on my computer. Many of them were simply too horny for my main site, but I wanted to put them somewhere since knew some people would like them. I featured fan art of her there as well. I deleted the site during one of my many attempts to cut out porn from my life.
  • A Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball companion site. This one is still live at zackisland.net.
  • I’m working on another website right now that is focused on printed media. I plan on distributing the JAMMS zine there, plus whatever other comics, art prints, etc. that I come up with later.

jlc: back in like 2005 - 2010 i had a personal site, hand crafted html type stuff. I saw the writing on the wall for where web was heading with the rise of AJAX in like 2007 or so, and knew it was not for me. I’ve mostly avoided anything to do with web dev as much as possible.

3. what do you use to write your website and if applicable, build it?

admittedly the interviewer made a mistake and neglected to send this question to each individual. if you happen to be an individual who was not given an opportunity to answer this question, please feel free to shoot us a message, and we’ll include the updated response as soon as we get the chance.

jlc: Website is edited in acme on 9front through drawterm. Most pages are a small indental format entry that just has the meta data for the page (ie title, tags, parent, etc). If a page is of type “text” my static site builder (muffet) will look for a text file in a specific directory with the same name and insert it to the html or gemini file. Similarly if i have an image with the same name in my backgrounds folder it will be add the css snippet to the file to make the page use it. The ’lo’ subdomain (low bandwidth) is defined in httpd-rc to sed replace links to internally link to lo.cybersavior instead of www.cybersavior and removes the backgrounds and font defines from all pages it serves in real time. I use Muffet (https://lo.cybersavior.dev/site/muffet.html) to build the site. Muffet is based on the old C oscean from 100r in concept (using indental format database to define site structure) but all the code was built from scratch in plan9 C by me.

mark and ouro identified my negligence regarding the third question…i even had one written down too!

4. why did you decide to become a webmaster?

ouro: Some of the oldest pieces of writing on ouroboros.cafe were originally articles on Dotesmite’s dcrs.xyz , a website which she later took down. I had by that point become quite accustomed to have this little online magazine and originally only wanted to rebuild what I had lost. Posts N0thanky0u made at that time would have been quite influential and it seemed as good an excuse as any to learn how to code.

jlc: Was messing around with plan9/9front and wanted something “to do with it” and decided why now. It’s obviously taken on a life and meaning it’s own now. It’s nice to just have some place to put stuff i do. I used to make videos about things, but i dunno, it’s hard to justify “feeding the beast” as it were. With the site i have control of what goes up, and none of the pesky metrics to feed the dopamine addiction helps too.

mark:

n0: I’ve been interested in exploring options outside the corporate mainstream of tech for a long time (linux user for over 10 years for example), and creating a personal website seemed like a logical extension of this philosophy. I very much dislike the centralized, comodified enclosure of the web.

5. do you have any stats or numbers youve collected (e.g hitcount, number of pages, how big is the site in MB or GB) that you’d like to share?

jlc: total http site size is 338 Meg, including images, audio files source tar balls etc. source tree is 401 html files. but that includes a page for every rss feed entry so, that’s 79 pages that are mostly stubs (some entries actually are more than that i guess) I don’t keep track of “page views” (i mean i could process my log file, but… i don’t want to…) but i know the vast majority of my served pages come from scrapers and seo bots. i probably serve about .6-1.5 gigs of data per month.

mark:

n0: neocities tells me my site has accumulated 436,416 views. I suspect that number is mostly bots. My site is just under 11mb in total, with around 75 pages.

ouro: The site is 110.34 MB in size, largely from the uncompressed versions of some images and it gets around 600 Visits, 1k hits a day according to neocities, though I very much doubt that much of that is real traffic. There were two wildly anomalous days where the site got 20k hits and I still don’t know what happened there.

6. what are you most proud of as a webmaster?

**mark:**The part of my site that I’m the most proud of changes a lot. I really love using Hugo shortcodes, and I get a lot of satisfaction when I finally figure out the programming side of whatever shortcode I’m working on. I’m very proud of the zines, but that’s kind of separate from being a webmaster. My favorite page on my site is the high score page.

n0: I am proud of the content of my posts (some of them at least), and the minimalism I have adhered to in the design.

ouro: The general vibe of the landing page. I redesigned everything significantly about two years ago involving a lot of sketches and the beginnings of an honest to God design bible. I think it’s very clean without being sterile, it’s sharp and modern and still vaguely occult. It works. I can’t imagine it looking any different anymore.

jlc: um… i dunno. muffet itself probably? altho i’m not sure “pride” is the right word. I like it. it does the job. There’s no pages on the site that i feel are “way better” or “took a ton more effort” to make them things i care about more than anything else. The whole site is a joy for me to go through, just follow my links and wind up listening to a page i have forgotten about and remembering that moment.

7. is there anything you’d like to share that wasn’t mentioned?

n0: If you want to create your own website, I recommend joining a pubnix which offers web hosting, rather than using neocities or some similar service as I did. It’s a fun, pro-social way to do internet.

ouro: This is nice. I wish more people were doing it. I vastly prefer typing into a receptive void over typing into one of those bot infested sludge factories we call social media. Occasionally the void sends you an email and this too is appreciated. Let’s all build little temples for each other amidst the wired.

jlc: also serve gemini, mostly the same stats (size is probably marginally smaller since gemini format has less bloat) if i wanted to avoid bots i’d only do gemini since every served page there is actually a person.

mark: Be careful where you advertise your website.

8. may i share your answers in a publication of media creation for dogs?

ouro: Yes

jlc: i wouldn’t have answered at all if i cared :p

mark: Yes!

n0: you may

9. if applicable, how should i provide attribution?

jlc: jae@takarabune

mark: A link to maerk.xyz would be fine.

n0: just the name n0thanky0u is fine.

ouro: Linking to the site would be ideal.

https://ouroboros.cafe/ - ouro

https://lo.cybersavior.dev/ - jlc

https://n0thanky0u.neocties.org - n0

https://maerk.xyz/ - mark

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