I used to have a website. Actually, I’ve had a few.
Somewhere in the ancient ruins of GeoCities there was a site made by a kid who had recently discovered that HTML meant you could make the internet look however you wanted. There was definitely a guestbook. At some point there was a Shakira fan page. I saved things to floppy disks, opened HTML files in Notepad, borrowed bits of code from other websites, changed things until they worked, and occasionally broke everything with absolutely no idea why.
Then came MySpace, which may have been the perfect social network for me because they gave us access to CSS and just let us loose.
I was really good at customizing my MySpace profile.
The internet felt different then. I’m not going to pretend it was all better. Dial-up was terrible, websites randomly played music at you, and we made some truly questionable design choices. But the web felt smaller, weirder, and much more personal.
People made websites because they wanted a place to put things. Their favorite band, photos, writing, links they liked, whatever they happened to be obsessed with at the time. There didn’t always need to be an audience or even much of a point.
You made something. You put it on the internet.
I miss that. 
Somewhere Along the Way, I Stopped
It wasn’t really a decision.
The internet changed, and life got bigger. Work became a career. I became a mom. There were relationships, houses, kids, jobs, and all the normal life stuff that slowly replaced evenings spent tweaking CSS because I had suddenly decided my navigation needed to look different.
At the same time, the internet made it very easy to stop maintaining your own website. Photos went on Instagram. Careers went on LinkedIn. Code went on GitHub. Books went on Goodreads. There was already somewhere to put almost anything.
Apparently my solution was to create more accounts.
I have created an embarrassing number of Instagram accounts over the years because I was definitely going to maintain a separate account for that particular interest this time.
I did not.
And every one of those accounts really started with the same thought: I should make a place for this.
Which is funny, because that’s exactly what I was doing twenty-something years ago.
I just used to call it a website.
I Wanted My Own Place Again
At some point recently, I started wanting one again.
I wanted somewhere to put the things I make, learn, figure out, and want to remember without first deciding which account or platform they belong on.
I also genuinely love getting the chance to share something I know a ridiculous amount about with someone who actually wants to know it. There is a particular kind of joy in someone asking a question and realizing, Oh. I know this one.
Maybe I already spent way too long researching it. Maybe I made the mistakes first, found the obscure tutorial, compared seventeen options, or figured out the weird workaround.
I love getting to hand that knowledge over to someone else.
This gives me somewhere to do that, even when nobody happens to be standing in front of me asking the question yet.
It also gives me somewhere to keep things.
I recently tried to find my old GeoCities site on the Wayback Machine and couldn’t. I would love to see it now. The bad graphics. The Shakira page. Whatever teenage me decided was important enough to publish on the World Wide Web.
I didn’t think to save any of it.
I’d like to do a better job of that this time.
Also, Can We Talk About the Ads?
There is one part of the modern web I absolutely do not want to recreate here.
Every. Single. Blog. Website.
Why are there a million ads?
I click an article because someone has exactly the information I need, and before I can read it I’m closing a cookie banner, a newsletter popup, an autoplaying video, and something covering the bottom third of my screen. Then I scroll down and there’s an ad between every couple of paragraphs. Something loads late, the entire page jumps, and now I’ve lost my place.
I understand why advertising exists. Websites cost money and people deserve to be paid for their work.
But I hate how often the actual experience of using the website gets destroyed in the process.
I care about what websites feel like. I always have. Half the fun of making them was deciding how they looked and what happened when someone clicked around.
I want JustAmanda.net to feel good to use.
Open something. Read it. Look at the pictures. Click around. No obstacle course required.
Apparently that feels almost rebellious now.
And Somehow We Ended Up at .net
Naming this place took longer than it probably should have. I came up with names involving archives, journals, field notes, indexes, and various other things that made the whole project sound much more serious than I wanted it to be.
Eventually I landed on the obvious answer.
Just Amanda.
justamanda.com wasn’t available, so I started looking at other domain endings. When I got to .net, I kind of loved it.
.net feels like the old internet to me.
I came online when seeing a .net address was completely ordinary, long before I knew anyone had opinions about domain strategy or personal branding. It feels like a tiny nod to the version of the web where I first learned I could make my own place online just because I wanted one.
So, JustAmanda.net.
I don’t have a content calendar. I don’t have a posting schedule. I’m not trying to figure out what kind of “content” performs best.
I’ve spent enough years watching the internet turn everything into content, every empty space into an ad, and every website into something that wants something from me.
I just want to make a website.
Find something interesting. Learn about it. Make something. Write it down. Put it online.
And now I have somewhere to put it.
My own little corner of the internet.
Again.
