How I Almost Destroyed The Internet

📓 Entry #001 — “I Have Created A Website (I Think?)”

July 12

Dear Online Logbook of Programming Things,

Today I began my journey into web development. First of all, did you know anyone can make a website? Like, actually make one? I thought you had to be hired by Google or at least know someone at Amazon.

Turns out you just go to a thing called “Domains4Dirt” and buy one for $1. I bought one. I own it. It’s called www.not_scamming-and-spamming_3000.deal. Because everyone hates that, and I added the “3000” so people know it’s futuristic and cool.

I opened something called Notepad and started typing things I remembered from viewing the source code of Yahoo in 2008. Then I saved it as mywebsite.exe because .exe files are official and powerful, and all you have to do is click on it and hit enter.

My laptop got really hot and the screen turned blue and stopped working. I talk to a guy who hangs out at the liquor store next to the library who says he owns a software company, I took it to him and he said he couldn’t do anything because of all the cookies and cache were corrupted. So I bought a new one from the computer shop. They were really helpful when I almost got the wrong one, they told me I needed a high performance graphics card or else the same thing would happen again.

Then I went on a forum someone linked me to in a comment section under a YouTube video called “How to Hack Wi-Fi With HTML”. The forum is called codevoid.dev and it is AMAZING. Everyone there seems very smart. One person (named reboot_me) told me not to use .exe and that websites are made with HTML and not PowerPoint. (I had been copy-pasting shapes from an old presentation because it seemed easier.)

I asked how to put buttons on the site. They sent me a thing called a “snippet.” It looked like:

<button>Click me</button>

So I copied it exactly 94 times and now the homepage is just a wall of buttons. None of them do anything. Yet.

Also, I downloaded something called “JavaScript” but I think I did it wrong because I just saved the Wikipedia article as a PDF.

One of the guys on the forum (I think he might be famous?) said he was “forking my project” — which sounds aggressive but maybe it’s good? I told him “thank you for attacking my code.”

I’m feeling really good about this. I even set up a “back end” by creating a new Gmail account and calling it server.backend9000@gmail.com. I plan to have users email it directly to interact with the site.

This is going better than expected.

Tomorrow I’m going to make a login form. I haven’t decided yet if I want passwords to be required or optional. Still thinking about the UX.

Yours in digital creation,
👶 Web Dev (Day 1)
aka “The Internet Is Malleable And I Hold The Hammer”