Big changes coming! I had a bout of deep inspiration last night and I’m going to be expanding The Cozy Cat big time. I really want to be a foundational resource in the community to help get newcomers into the small web. It’s been a very therapeutic and liberating experience for me, as well as something I’ve become rather passionate about since I’ve started. I want to be able to share it with my friends and family, and people in general and set it up in a way that is really beginner friendly.
Not everyone is super experienced in html/CSS to code their own websites from scratch, and while Neocities is great for folks who know enough, it is not beginner friendly to the general population who might not have any coding know how. So I’m going to spend the next few weeks/months developing a space with WordPress that is beginner friendly and my friends and family will be the testers. They’ll get to make their own profiles and private pages on one of my subdomains and experiment with making a space that’s truly their own. I’ll teach them how to use and incorporate RSS feeds as this would make a really great standard of keeping up with friends and other people on the small web and staying connected. Everything will be at their fingertips and hopefully by the end of it, they’ll feel confident enough to venture off and create an independent space of their very own.
After being here a few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that the small web is really great if you have even just a little bit of coding knowledge, but there’s definitely still a gap I think that makes it a very intimidating endeavor for those who really have no clue how to code at all, and I think as a community, if we really care about bringing people to the small web and helping them move away from corrupt platforms and walled gardens, there needs to start being more of a focus on making entry points for folks to explore the small web who are at the most beginner level. We need to see it from the point-of-view that most people have been stuck in these walled gardens for so long that have not given them any tools to express hardly any creativity, unlike the Myspace era which was quite a bit more creative. Most folks are used to the most basic of the basic, they’ve been given a small little box to sit inside of, and that’s it. We need to help teach them how to step outside of their boxes and start painting their own worlds, starting with paint-by-numbers, if you get my analogy.
Anyways, that is my goal and project for the next several months. In the future I’d also like to make up some copy/paste marketing campaigns for people to use to help get the word out about the small web on places like Kijiji, Craigslist or even something that can be shared on Facebook, X, etc. People aren’t going to know this exists unless we tell them about it or they stumble upon it by some freak accident. So for those who would be interested in doing that, I’ll have marketing materials made up down the road for people to share. I’m excited to see this movement grow!