I just wanted to do a check in of how I feel about using this site more regularly for 3 months since June of this year, and what the future holds for starsbegantofall.com.
I originally bought this site in 2020 because of Kiriska‘s very compelling articles about stepping back from social media and having your own curated content on your own site that is not at the whim of some out of touch financial person and an incomprehensible algorithm and user-unfriendly interface. I had just spent hours working on a videogame and the completed game’s file size was a little too big to upload to any safe website for download. Remembering the fun I had making geocities websites in highschool and college, I decided to take on the risk of uploading content to my own corner of the internet. My previous domain’s name was insomniel.com, purchased for me by a friend and had expired and since sold to some squatter company, so I had to think of a new domain name that wasn’t used yet, hence starsbegantofall.com, birthed March of 2020.
After the pandemic went on and on and on, I realized my dreams of working on videogames wasn’t going to come true (I had no friends to help, and also I wasn’t that great at making the art for games lol), so I was at a loss of what to do with the domain. I tried several times to work with the wordpress setup (the interface I was most used to) and other add-ons, but I’m stupid and couldn’t figure out basic things like setting up a shop, migrating blog entries, making a newsletter, etc. I missed the geocities of old.
Finally, in 2023, I forced myself to just accept the website as it is will have to look bad forever with black text on white screen and optimized for mobile users instead of desktop users and I cannot change any of those aspects unless I pay a ton of money. Once I accepted this, I felt free to post whatever the hell I want on this site as my main blog and take my time with the additional features. Like a forum? Hahaha.
Also, I decided against migrating my old blogs to this site and just start fresh. My old blogs were really judgey and immature, super cringe, from over 10 years ago, and I don’t want to keep those sub-par entries here. But for as long as blogger.com and wordpress.com survives, I still want to refer to those blogs for archival and nostalgia purposes, so I added a link list for my best lolita and j-fashion blog entries on blogspot. I think I will also repost all of my art survey collections and my Final Fantasy Tactics fanart, too, those are fun and deserve archiving here.
As for what you will see on this website, I will add in the upcoming months:
- a monthly newsletter for people who don’t want to deal with a rss feed
- an online shop (Ko-fi and etsy is what I use now, but just in case there was an American customer who doesn’t want to make an account? idk)
- separate from the wordpress format, a working replica of my old websites from insomniel.com, maybe devoted to one specific subject each for fun
- maybe I will add modules of my social media, just a preview thumbnail as a reminder for as long as those sites exist
- a “webring,” remember that? I will add link lists to other domain sites I follow!
- graphics for general use (I still owe my brother some graphics for his sites, not that he has time for them anymore lol)
If you think of anything else you see on other websites that I should add to this site, let me know! I’m really excited for the future of this website, and I want to make it fun and interesting for you, the viewer. But in the worst case scenario, at least updating this website entertained me lol.