The occasionally-updated public notebook of Scott Nesbitt

A Home Page, Not a Website

Lately, ideas around the smaller web and digital minimalism have been on heavy rotation in my brain. And, of course, I've been pondering how to apply those ideas to my online and digital lives.

It dawned on me that the best place to start was my own website. In that past, that site was a set of pages that spread out from a central landing page — like most sites on the web. But it wasn't always that way.

In the heady days of the web in the early 1990s, that site was a single page. A traditional home page. So, why not go back to that? I took the plunge and spent a whole 10 minutes consolidating the various bits of my website into a single page.

Instead of having a long page crammed with text, I used the magic of HTML5 to create a set of expandable sections. No JavaScript required, just a couple of HTML tags. One click is all it takes to expand or collapse those sections.

Now that I have a home page instead of a website, that piece of my online presence is easier to maintain. It keeps the size of my corner of the web small. And while that homepage is pretty basic, it works. What else do I need?