I’ve always had a fear that without sharing my thoughts, they would be forgotten permanently.
I created this site because I wanted a way to showcase my skills and share my knowledge with the world while remaining pseudonymous. This is my dream home on the internet, free of JavaScript, advertising, and trackers. The entire website is written in HTML and CSS, without a CMS or anything in the middle.
Why the name "Unfathoming"?
Definition of Unfathoming:
Unfathoming: Synonym of Unfathomable. Present tense. To find hard to believe, not in a way rooted in skepticism, but because it is a difficult reality to process.
I picked this name because it's a word that represents my life and who I am. I'm one of those people who has a boring life on the surface, but go a little deeper and you'll find that it's anything but boring. I was going to go for "Unfathomed" but I like to live in the present, not in the past, so I went with Unfathoming. Plus the .ing exists and the word wasn't taken yet.
Why a website?
I created a clean, minimal website becuase I want something that can theoretically last for hundreds of years. Companies go out of business and terms of service change. Ya' know what won't change? The ability to write a website in pure HTML and CSS, and have that site displayed in the browser.
I'm a strong believer in ownership over renting, and being able to put my entire site on an external drive for backup is such a freeing thing that Facebook won't give you.
Optimization
I'm tired of the modern web, where every webpage is unnecessarily large and contains more <script> than <p>. I've put a lot of effort into optimization, readability, and accessibility. Every page will load in under 10kb unless its a long blog post or it includes images. This is optimization that you'll never get on social media sites that are typically bloated up with JavaScript.
The small web is great
If you haven't heard of it, the small web is a concept focused on simple, privacy-respecting, sovereign content that's people-first. The five general principles are below:
- Create whatever you're passionate about
- Quality over quantity, people over profit
- Collect as little data on users as possible
- Utilize simple, stable web standards
- Do one thing and do it well
All of these principles speak to me, and so I've created this site in accordance with them as a set of strict guidelines to the best of my ability.
The small web has some problems though, mainly in the UX department. I built Unfathom.ing to be fast, accessible, and easily printed onto paper for archiving / offline access / teaching.
My vision for this site
I hope this website will become a place for me to freely share ideas, without dealing with comments, likes, or other statistics. Maybe someday something that I write will be so good that someone uses it in a classroom or shares it with a friend, who knows, but it would make me smile.
Why the site is the way it is
I think that lacking basic features like search encourages exploration and rewards creativity. With a search feature, the site becomes very linear and you can reasonably find everything quickly.
As for why there's no comments; I don't want to deal with spam or the potential of attacks caused by injecting nasty stuff into the comments. Moderation is not something I do, so I decided to save myself the headache and avoid it altogether.