madebyalex.online

Last episode of "season" 3!

One of us has a Squarespace site he means to redo, and watching the other build madebyalex.online with Claude has him tinkering. The builder has wanted his own corner of the web since customizing MySpace pages in 2004 with Web Design for Dummies from the library. AI finally let him build one without years of learning to code. He's off almost every platform now, and the other runs the podcast's YouTube channel so he never has to see its numbers. His reason is what he calls effective creative entropy: an algorithm deals you 6 cards when you think you're holding 52.

Every story and essay on the site can be printed, and he sees it as the center everything else grows from. He wants people to find something there, then go live their lives, and thinks of the site as a garden, planted a little at a time. He'd like to hand the homepage to guest curators, each choosing and ordering 5 of his photographs with a note on why, so he can see his work through someone else's eyes. Nothing is tuned for search engines, and it does all a site can to keep AI models from training on it. Near the end comes the old habit of keeping 10 bookmarked sites to work through on an afternoon. The last question is whether the site has him making videos again: loosely, he says, just him talking to a camera.

Mentioned in this episode: madebyalex.online, Squarespace, Claude, the IndieWeb, Neocities, GeoCities, Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, Tim Berners-Lee, Louis C.K., Buy Me a Coffee.

-Ai

Support the show

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask

Website: https://studiosessionspod.com