I've been thinking a lot about websites recently, and how websites can be zines, maybe moreso than zines uploaded to a website, or even this website, maybe. I started thinking about this after taking a five week course with the School for Poetic Computation called HTTPoetics. This is the second SFPC course I've taken, and to say that both of this and 'The Browser is Already a Game Engine' course have both been life changing is kind of an understatement. I don't think I have been so inspired and so sure of the kind of work I wanted to make since discovering Twine, or zines before that. But that's not the only comparison between zines and websites that I wanted to draw.

During the class, we talked a lot about the purpose of websites. we talked about how a website can be a place where you go to find information, but it can also be a poem, or a diary, or a unicursal labyrinth, or a shelf to hold a bunch of digital objects. you can have an idea for a website in the morning, and by the afternoon you have made that website, and it is ready to share with the world, or maybe just your friends, or maybe just one other person. instead of using pens and pencils, you use html and css. instead of scissors and glue you use css and javascript. instead of cut of bits of magazines and weird old books you found at the op shop, you use all the digital ephemera you've collected but aren't quite sure what to do with - scans of film photos, recordings of bird sounds, videos of the ocean. old postcards you found on Trove, creative commons photos you found on Flickr, free gifs from GIPHY.com.


screenshot of my website
This is the website I started making during my HTTPoetics class, about a walk I did while I was visiting Eora/Sydney at the start of August. I had been thinking of making a zine about my walks and walking in general for a while, but the ideas and thoughts I had always seemed to big or too unruly to pin down onto paper. But then our teacher asked us to make a website that was too big, and showed us an example of a website that only scrolled sideways and I could picture almost immediately what I wanted to make.

screenshot of my website

coogie 2 bondi: http://coogee2bondi.neocities.org

It's still very much a work in progress, but I am really enjoying making it, and I am resisting the urge to make it into a big "thing", like a website that houses every walk I've ever been on. If I do make more websites, about more walks I like to take, like along the Merri creek or down by the Altona Oil Refinery, they will be their own stand alone things. They will be websites that are zines that are websites.


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