[ INTEL ]

— Unit Data

Hello, World!

Hello. I made this website to protect the things I like from disappearing.

It was on the spur of the moment, after I decided to look through all the liked YouTube videos I'd accumulated since the early 2010s, and found a significant chunk made private or deleted by their uploaders. I then wondered about all the sites sitting neglected in my bookmarks bar and clicked on some I probably added years ago, only to find 404 pages or worse, the site no longer existing altogether.

The Internet is only forever if someone remembers to back it up. There are so many webpages, forums, and posts that have vanished off the face of the web, the Wayback Machine and Google Cache included.Nobody at the time saw them as worthy of preservation, and now some ultimately-not-important-but-fun pieces of my childhood exist only in my memories, and memories don't stay vivid forever.

Even when people do archive something, once said piece of media has been taken down and can only be viewed through the Wayback Machine, it's next to impossible for someone to stumble upon it again without first having preexisting knowledge of it, or being directed there by someone else. So my plan is to use this site as a kind of 'media diary', for me to note down and write my thoughts on whatever site/article/video I've come across for the day, not just for me to reminisce, but also share it with whoever happens to come across this obscure corner of the web so that its memory may be preserved.Even if I receive no visitors at all, it'll be nice for me to look back in a couple years and see what my younger self was up to.

Another reason why I'm doing this is, I suspect, the same as many other people who want to be a part of the Indie Web. I want to get away from the 24/7 outrage machine that is current social media. I greatly dislike what seems to me a culture of dogmatic distrust and mockery of whoever does not align with your tribe, and the policing of creative works for their supposed moral failings (AKA the author doesn't treat their story like an Aesop's Fable). There is a lot of anger and negativity out there, and I think I'm better off spending my time online not surrounded by pessimism and gloom.

I also want to slow down and take the time to process the content I consume, instead of scrolling down an endless feed and continuously flitting from one piece of content to the other. I've spent evenings binging YouTube channels or blogs with my brain turned off, where at the end of it I felt I didn't really absorb anything before reaching for my next dopamine hit. Hopefully this changes that.

Now that I've written down all of this, I'd look silly if I don't keep to my word and end up neglecting this site for almost a year again. I've made it my 2025 resolution to try and update this project of mine at least monthly. With any luck this may be something I'll continue to run even if Neocities ever goes down.

Published: 5 January 2025 / 531

Diaries Exist

I wrote this to remind myself not to be a dumbass. Though I intend this site to be an ever-growing record of my memories, I’ve also written down some guidelines for myself on how to blog while still maintaining my privacy in the long term. This will be updated as necessary.

1. Diaries Exist, Dummy

Some things just don’t belong on a public blog. If it’s something you don’t want a complete stranger to ask you about in the middle of the street, don’t post it online for everyone with a computer to view, save and share. As a rule of thumb, don't share anything you aren't 100% comfortable with going viral.

In the same vein, be comfortable with people making comments about you. Not everyone is a ray of sunshine, and there are trolls who will try to provoke you into a reaction, as well as people who plain disagree and/or make uncharitable assumptions of you. Many online personalities have gained more notoriety and eyes on them by overreacting to disagreement or criticism, which only attracts more negative attention. Don't be like them.

2. Be Aware of Digital Breadcrumbs

When writing about your life, it’s easy to let small details slip. Sharing your age in one post and your birthday in another will let any visitor know your date of birth. Uploading photos that consistently cluster around a specific location or with their metadata intact will give sleuths a hint where you live. Oversharing about your hometown or workplace may lead to people digging up your Linkedin profile and all the information that comes with it.

On their own, each one is simply an inevitable product of talking about yourself online. But they can snowball over time into a detailed digital footprint that you don’t even realise you’re leaving behind. People tend to be doxed because of the personal information they leak entirely on their own. This issue is compounded if you start linking accounts together or using the same username everywhere.

Your mileage will vary on how much this matters to you. Some people like having a consistent username as part of their digital identity. Others are shy on large social platforms but will happily post selfies and talk about where they live in 'private' chatrooms like Discord. Some post under their real names for business purposes. If having any of your real life be linked to your online presence bothers you, I suggest making a list of what you deem absolutely unacceptable to reveal and then shut up about them. Never giving specifics or mixing lies with the truth also helps.

You may think this is being overly paranoid. I do feel, if you're looking for genuine connection and conversation with others online, you eventually have to share more than the bare minimum. Thousands of people have also blogged about their lives with their names and faces on full display with no little effect. However, it only takes one person to be mad enough to go through your online profiles and leak your (and potentially your family's) personal information to skeevy places/people, so it's a risk I'd rather not take for now.

3. Use a Password Manager

I know this advice has been all over the internet for the last decade, but I really cannot recommend this enough. Once, I scoffed at the idea of giving some private company access to all of my login details and instead wrote them down using pen and paper. But when I followed the next most popular privacy tip and compartmentalised my accounts, keeping track of all my unique login details got unwieldy.

Personally, I found giving a password manager a shot helped make the process of organising and pruning my online presence as necessary easier. I use Bitwarden, which also allows me to check whether the passwords I used were in any data breaches, or if I had any duplicate passwords. If you’re more organised or tech savvy than I, you can probably create your own secure option using an Excel sheet or a locally hosted vault.

In the same vein, use Two-Factor Authentication on everything. There really isn’t any reason to not use it, since it gives you an extra layer of security if your login details are somehow leaked. Having to pull out your phone to log in to something can be troublesome, yes, but it’s worth it for the extra peace of mind.

Published: 4 January 2025 / 737

Hello, World!

Somewhat ironically, I wanted to create a site on Neocities after reading about its flaws.

I first heard about this platform on Reddit a couple years ago, while reading the comments section under some provocative headline or factoid I can no longer remember. The commentors described it as a throwback to the glorious days of the Old Web in the 1990s and early 2000s, where people didn’t just flit between the same few content aggregators or social media platforms, bombarded by targeted advertising and algorithmically-served content. Here was a space for people to browse and make their own independent personal sites, created simply for the love of sharing what they care about with others, a stand against the modern monetised web.

i think, therefore i am.