The Absolute State of this Web Address, a Most Excellent Treatise About my Personal Home Page; or, The Modern Site of Theseus
Today, we celebrate a record-breaking eight and a half years of nothing happening on this website. Will the situation ever change? Will the situation change... soon..? Maybe.
While the site has changed since 2018, most modifications were minor and most additions were inaccessible.
Thus, for the better part of a decade, zetanor dot net was functionally frozen in time.
Suddenly, though, in late November 2025, everything changed: I forgot to pay the server bill. And I'm just now getting around to setting things back up.
I think this is what the pros call "SEO optimization", which will hopefully bring my monthly readership from 10 humans and 2500 bots down to 0 humans and 2000 bots.
I've had various websites since the days of Multimania
and Geocities,
but this here one is technically 18 years young if you count years of dormancy.
It was built and rebuilt many times, often resulting in pages that never saw the light of day.
At various points, it supported Internet Explorer, had <table> layouts, displayed Flash objects, ran on Wordpress, expressed XHTML, used jQuery, and existed atop various hosts and backends.
In 2026, it rises and shines once more, wading invincibly through stagnation and now even death!
It will continue to exist, for I occasionally enjoy spending time on it. Simple as.
If you enjoy clicking through here—which I hope you do—well, that's just gravy on top of the sundæ.
When I wrote my previous post a long while ago, personal home pages and blogs had been on the decline. Since then, tech giants have really stepped on the repulsion pedal. Attention sucking algorithms and heavy-handed psychological manipulation were present back then, but now there's starting to be a public spotlight on these things. Among various other reactions (such as simply logging off), I've seen a growing minority of Internet addicts showing interest in the man-scale Web of yore. Some efforts have managed to gain traction among digital weirdos: Wiby, Neocities, Kagi Small Web, Bear Blog, Marginalia, and so on.
I've not followed this little "renaissance" much, so I don't know how well it held up after COVID (fun times! no craziness at all!),
but I sympathize with anyone who goes out of their way to use technology as a personal outlet.
Even just shitposting on social media is arguably better than scrolling short-form videos.
The creation of something utterly insignificant is infinitely more respectable than any consumption.
Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly how I left things prior to the sudden disappearance event a few months ago, so here's what I think someone might notice as new if they had an eidetic memory:
- Existing information has been restructured into the Blotter and Compendium sections. For example, the page I'm writing this text on used to be at /a/index2017/.
- New pages have been created in the Compendium. Some aren't published yet.
- Years of revolving door content was to autonomous sites in the /a/ root directory. The LettrGuessr game is the most recent finished example. There's no good way to find them yet, and some aren't published yet.
- Lots of pages were tested and tweaked to work on a vertical screen (phone), but there's still work to do there.
- The favicon has been updated to be larger than 16x16.
- Audio on all pages has been switched to not autoplay, and to have visible controls.
Additionally, I've fixed the Atom news feed, now available at /feed/ or as a link somewhere else on this page. If you'd like to keep up with any website online, a feed reader tends to be the best way to do that.
Future plans include finishing a good amount of unfinished content, publishing that, and making all available content discoverable in some way.
This has been ya boi Zetanor, signing out.
If you are ever afraid, just remember that I love you.