📈 sitoctt - From 3 months ago to today, the beginning and the reasons

This article can probably be considered as the first of a series on the site philosophy, if you want to say so.
To start, what is better to talk about, if not everything that led to the birth of the site and began to characterize it?

When, 3 months ago now, I had just started to conceive the ctt site, one of the things I felt was that I didn’t have a place in which to arrange my stuff - the stuff to be preserved and shared publicly, at least - in a way that made it tidy, available, watchable, usable, and loss-proof.

Let’s go back to before

To get to where everything is now, however, it took time.
Do we want to go back to the end of May for a moment, to see how things were back then? Let’s start with a technical table!

First of all, the entire site in source form took up just a few dozen KB. Normal, the pages could be counted on the fingers of a severed hand and they weren’t who knows how rich.
Now, however, we are at half a MB excluding all multimedia assets (except the favicon).

Even static, my static site generator that I started developing at the same time as the CTTT site was nothing special: just 250 lines!
Not that the current 1300 are many - not at all, and it’s better that way - but the growth is visible.

However, if, with an image (ignoring that my font didn’t load, even though I had already included it at the time), we see how the site was in practice in its first days… ahhh, but how rough some of the details were , compared to today?

My rambling speech still appeared more or less as it does today on the home page, but the rest is barely recognizable.
Everything seems emptier… since all the little icons and buttons that I now have at the edges and in the global menu are missing. Yes, the latter already existed; its usefulness in those days was almost nil, considering that the pages present were number 2, but let’s say that it was a good thing to have created it immediately.

The placectt

The writer in the center of the screen, however, has something wrong with her.
Oh yes, there is a curious little anecdote - perhaps not necessary, but for me it is because I’m in charge here - which needs to be told properly.

Those who followed the creation of the site in its primordial days already know this, but the site lived under the name “postoctt” for a good 2 weeks.
In the initial moment of imagining this thing, in fact, the platform did not exist in an exact and defined way. We thought about the “place”, but in a vague and still confused way.

In the end, predictably, I settled on a website.
For some reason though, the name “postoctt” didn’t stink to me soon enough. It took me a long time to realize that that name was reminiscent, at least in part, of something related to the post office… A situation, I would say, not exactly optimal.
So, I thought about changing the name to “sitoctt”.

Octt’s site

The only really important thing, however, has never changed: “occt”.
At the end of the name there is always Octt, that is me. Whether it’s a site, a place, a post office, what matters is that it’s mine; and speaking precisely of this, of the fact that the site is mine, there is a lot to say.

The site is mine because I have complete freedom to make it the way I want.
If already in the mid-90s the only real limit for a website was the creativity of the person who built it, today the potential of the Web platform is truly infinite; although, in a certain way, it doesn’t seem that way at all if you only frequent the common Web.

The sites of the “non-personal” Internet all have the same same and banal appearance.
Many blogs or demo sites use recycled graphic templates. Modern social platforms (Mastodon, Friendica, Pleroma, and so on and so forth) limit customization to a photo, a banner, and a description. Stuff like Misskey already does more, but it absolutely doesn’t reach the levels of total customization, with granular precision, that only a site The Web - even if it were a forum like those of the past, and not a private space - allows.

Great expressiveness

And here’s another of my desires that unconsciously condensed itself as the purpose of the site: creating something that I felt was missing not only for what affects me, but the whole of the community of Artisanal web in general.
There are several other sites founded on this idea, of using the Web with tools, including manual ones, to express one’s personality, creativity and imagination, but: almost none are in Italian (one day I will talk about this too), and in any case I am pleased to contribute to the growth of what can be considered a global collection.

With websites you can choose in the smallest details animations, colors, backgrounds, fonts, arrangements, alignments, categorizations, embellishments, interactions, but always remaining in the field of documents.
Really nice is the fact that with handwritten CSS, even just a few dozen lines, you can already establish a unique graphic identity. Then the real bulk of the code only translates into minor (but still appreciable) details.

Leaving aside the means: this, the idea of ​​creating a collateral gallery, was one of my initial goals. In recent months I’ve left it aside a bit, in the sense that I’ve mainly focused on creating content, thinking that ✨ the sparkling details ✨ I could put them when it happens.. and I should start doing it, honestly! At the moment only the home page has great particularities, if we exclude the overall style of the site which I have worked on with a minimum of regularity.

The importance of content

Not that it’s a bad thing to put content first, anyway; in fact, it’s a good thing. A site without real content and not regularly updated may perhaps be a piece of art if made to be beautiful or to have intrinsic meaning - but in itself it is not useful.
It’s something you find, admire, maybe share… and it all ends there. It is the content that gives real meaning, that guarantees a long life for the site, and keeps the public coming back from time to time.

The organization

Contents which, for goodness sake, must also be decently ordered.
I try, it took me a long time to arrive at what I have now, with a global menu that first of all includes fixed pages, such as the home page, because they have no specific category or because they are of particular importance.
Immediately following this, I have a list of sections, which I wanted to call “Collections”. They are links to pages that contain lists of any other page of a given topic. This path is also circular, considering that, from the individual content pages, you can click on the automatically generated entries to visit the pages of the relevant categories.

For now, there are perhaps a little few pages in the classic sense. I won’t repeat them here one by one because well - but even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to create a wall of links. Their particular reason for existing is told on them.
The real bulk of the site is in the blog articles.
For me there is a conceptual division to be respected between the two types of pages. Traditional ones can be something incomplete, always updating, work-in-progress by nature; the article pages should instead be created once, properly, and then ideally never touched again. I can create the normals as a draft, and update them a little whenever I want; the blog ones, however, remain private while I write them, and then, when they are finished, they become public. The latter require me to work more in the moment, and therefore they come out more rarely, but they are more loaded with content.

Digging up some things

New little things, made especially for the site, I have put and will put many, but the idea is to fill the place with even old stuff.
Some non-exclusive content is still already available in my other places on the Internet - in some cases without a license - like perhaps on my Mastodon profile; others, like very old posts from my Telegram channel, are archived and inaccessible except to me.
Those not archived are simply messy and poorly preserved, as well as without guarantees for those who want to copy or reuse them; those, however, which for one reason or another are archived, it is as if they did not exist for the world, and it is easy for me to lose them too.
Some of this data may have value, so this is unfortunate.

Like a month ago I announced with my decretocto (you didn’t understand a thing, right?), this is something that requires tedious work (taking the old one, evaluating its quality, copying the text, paste it into the new text files, layout it well, download photos and videos, optimize them well and upload them… nothing but the fun of creating, here it’s an assembly line!), but it has to be done.
With my free time I have already started doing it, and I will continue.
Posts from my old blog should also be archived here, again for organization and preservation - but those are easier.

To conclude: it doesn’t matter which ones, but in any case the contents are the meaning of the site. They are, however, only because they are freely available to anyone.
What does this really mean? Anyone who has read home should perhaps know this. I don’t dare add anything else, in any case; you will have to wait for a next article, one in which I will pick up the topic where I leave it now.

You too are the meaning of the sitectt. Thanks for reading! 💖