I'm tired of the "modern web". Web 3.0 was a mistake. There's too much interaction. Too much animation. If I'm scrolling and things start moving sideways, you've lost the plot.

I remember a time when people made personal websites for fun. They talked about what interested them: hobbies, games, blogs. Remember Geocities?

We need to return.

Publii Theming

As I've written about before, I use Publii to statically generate this website. Publii uses a templating engine to generate your site utilizing themes. As you'll see, they're all very slick, with dynamic designs and layouts. It's very impressive, especially when you consider it's all pre-generated and served as static files. Publii's engine is pretty powerful and you can get some very fancy site designs out of it.

I didn't want that. In fact, I wanted the opposite of that. So I decided to create my own theme: NetDream. I designed it to look like the antithesis of current web browsing. No animations, no fancy fonts, just the content that I want to convey. NetDream embraces the aesthetic of the time, drawing inspiration from early personal websites and Netscape Navigator.

Open Source

Because why not? It's a relatively simple theme. I have no reason to gate keep it, and I certainly wouldn't be able to sell it. However, I did decide to go with GPLv3 to ensure that if someone decides to make it even better we'll all benefit. If you want to submit a pull request or create a fork with some changes (perhaps you want to add some more 88x31 buttons?), feel free.

If you're curious about the code you can view it on Github. Or if you don't care about the internals and just want to use it, you can download the ZIP file here. Once you install it, you'll have several options to configure in the Theme settings for your project letting you set landing page text and theme colors.

If you use the theme, and let me know on Mastodon!