I am Racefan76, the owner of this website. I’m a Canadian, a tech worker, and a man interested in programming (duh), motor racing, video games, and food.
This website is my canvas and my repository. It’ll host all sorts of content I have created whilst being a creative exercise itself. This would take up more time and effort than setting up a traditional social media account, but I’m positive the complete personalization makes it worthwhile.
Yep, full personalization over here. Compare that to the profile pages of Instagram, Twitter (like hell I’d call it X), Facebook, and YouTube. If you take away the images and the username, every account looks… the same. It’s minimalistic, it’s… streamlined. I understand that it might be technically difficult to manage personalized styling for so many accounts, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It used to be a thing on YouTube. Take a look at the screenshots below. Notice how different each creator customized their page… pretty cool, eh?
(Both images came from Reddit.)
After all, isn’t one of the advertised purposes of social media supposed to be about expressing yourself?
Here, I can post whatever I want and style it however I wish. I can make my own categories, my own content of any type. It’s all mine.
And while that last part may seem a bit selfish, it’s true! You don’t really “own” your accounts on traditional social media platforms. Take it from their owners! Hell, for some platforms, higher-ups can just go out and manually edit your content because they got their feelings hurt.
And that’s not accounting for all sorts of ills that come from social media:
Of course, there are genuinely good users with excellent content, but they make up a very tiny fraction of the already tiny fraction of users actively posting content. I only keep these platforms just to stay “connected” with irl friends and don’t post publicly often.
I’d rather let all my creative and fun stuff be its own thing. With no moderators, advertisers, or anyone else who could threaten me, I can proudly claim this to be my own little safe space on the web.
I’d also like to shoutout two sources of my inspiration to make this website:
Cameron’s World: it’s an archive of the internet of yesteryear. Many Geocities webpages are saved on Cameron’s World and represent how people used to express themselves online. It’s really surprising that Geocities… just fell off, with no legacy. You’d think a platform with such popularity would at least be remembered more often.
Guide to the personal web: this video (the original, not the re-upload linked here) sold me on the benefits of joining the personal web. It got gears in my head grinding toward making this website.
As I said earlier… damn near anything. Blog posts, web shrines, mod downloads (I have painted cars for the old game NASCAR Racing 2003 Season), and whatever the hell else catches my eye.
So pull those seat belts one more time and get ready for some more action!
…once I get the rest of this site done :)