This Website, DanielJPapajohn.com

Introduction

This website isn't what we'd call 'good' a decade or two into the 21st century. It's extremely dated, looks that way, and has minimal functionality.

Hard to believe it was built by a professional web developer, isn't it?

I could make a fancier website, using modern best practices. I could write something in React, give it a slick backend, maybe use AWS Lambda functions, use something like Twitter Bootstrap for a fancy UI with responsive design, and on, and on, and on.

I make modern, professional web sites at work, and at the moment, I'm not particularly inclinded to do the same on my personal website when I get home. I do think it can be fun, and I might do more of that later, but for now, this is the kind of website I'm making.

Figure 1

Figure 1 above shows an early version of my website running on a Sega Dreamcast game console. Click to enlarge.

The inspiration for this bare-bones website was hooking my Sega Dreamcast up to the internet over a fake dial-up connection, and browsing with the browser for Dreamcast, Planetweb 2.0. Try it yourself, and you'll see that nearly no modern websites work. This is fine, because nobody actually needs to use something like an old Dreamcast browser. However, I thought it would be fun to make a website that functions well on a Dreamcast, and for the moment not worry about fancy, beautiful, feature rich modern websites.

You'll see some terrible, TERRIBLE things on this website if you open up the source. Things like using HTML tables for spacing of page elements. Things like the HTML 'center' tag. Some things like the HTML 'blink' tag just for fun. There are two reasons I'm doing this;

  1. This kind of gross website is fairly period appropriate for the Sega Dreamcast.
  2. The Sega Dreamcast browser doesn't support any modern web stuff.
I'm not exhaggerating on point two here, I assure you. All we have to work with is HTML 3.0, Javascript 1.1, and absolutely no CSS, whatsoever. These are dramatic limitations, which are quite a shock to a modern web developer, but it can also be fun to work within constraints. Some of the site still uses modern web features like CSS, but the intent is to make sure it looks fine on ancient browsers, especially the Dreamcast's, and not get bogged down with frameworks.

Philosophy of the Site

There are other reasons I like keeping this site extremely simple, to the point of ridiculousness; what Introduction care about for this site is content. I made this site as a way to document the projects I'm working on. I want to document them for myself, because documentation can save future me time not struggling to reproduce something I've made before. I also want to document my projects for you, so that if you like them, and want to make them yourself, make something inspired by these projects, or improve on these projects, you can.

I could do all of this on any number of other locations, like pre-built customizable websites, project sites like Instructables.com, social media, etc, but I'm doing it here. An important philosophy underpinning this is my belief in "content before chrome". This is taken from the Windows App design guidelines (Windows 8, Windows Phone, Zune, etc), and I think it's applicable to websites, physical projects, and even people.

I never expect this site to be quite beautiful, but I aim to make it clear, and usable.

Thank You

Thank you also for not telling me that I'm not using modern best practices. I know I'm not, I promise. Thanks also for your interest in the site, I hope you've found something of interest, and are enjoying it, primative as it is.