About me and my websites

I make websites since 1998 and try to use as less code as possible. I only use HTML, CSS and PHP. No ugly 🤮 JaVaScRiPt 🤪, no cookies, no third-party-crap in any way, only self-written code, all completely valid HTML5 and valid CSS, extremely high Lighthouse-scores and protected by a strong Content Security Policy. I code for fun and for people, not for financial gain and big techcompanies.

As for SEO (Search Engine Optimalization): I don't care. SEO is a Trojan horse: you bring it in because you think it will be good for you, but it won't and it will cause you to spend lots of money, obey dataharvesting companies and keep you awake at night because you worry about it.
So I don't care about SEO, I am a creator, not a follower. I create averge websites, crazy websites, interesting websites, artistical websites, rebellious websites and professional websites, I do it all, because I can. I say: webdevelopment can be art and if you say it can't, then we just disagree. I have blocked all BigTech-bots, I do not wish to get any traffic from them because I hate what these companies do and I don't want to participate in that. All other bots who identify themselves are welcome, unless you don't respect my rules in robots.txt.And ofcourse: most important of all: you beautiful, innocent, webbrowsing people are to my websites.

So it was 1998, many companies offered free webspace.
You could just create an account and go to the built-in WYSIWYG-editor and start writing. No need for knowledge of HTML (and CSS or PHP didn't even exist). The editor generated the HTML for you.

But some of these companies also offered a file-manager where you could write your own HTML and that was how I started using tags like <b>, <i>, <marquee> and advanced styling in those days was something like:
<p color="red" font-family="arial" font-size="24px">.

I made 1 website, 2 websites, 3 websites and I went on and on. I lost many of those websites because of an infection with a virus and a home-network-worm, which was pretty common in those days, so I learned to back-up things using floppy-disks, that was the safest way. I had hundreds of those.

Some time later: enter CSS and PHP. Wow... thát was a change: for the first time I took a domain-name of my own and a hosting-account, because the free webspace-companies did not offer PHP and only limited support for CSS (mostly inline styles like <p style="whatever">). And I started including with PHP, no more editing 130 footers: just include it in every website and you have one place only to edit and everything updates. I included like my life depended on it and still: I didn't include enough, like the doctype-declaration for example. And then HTML5 came and I wanted it, I wanted it badly, so I needed again to edit all websites to change the doctype-declaration, remove XHTML-trailing slashes, start using semantic tags etc. etc. That was the second time that I had to edit all sites manually.

The third time was when I started using a CSP, I had hundreds of inline-styles and the CSP did not accept that and I didn't want to use 'unsafe-inline' because that's equivalent to shutting down this CSP-directive: if you use 'unsafe-inline' you might as well throw away your CSP. So external stylesheets it had to be, classes and external stylesheets. And again I had to edit around 200 pages.

And some of those websites are still running and they are running strong: I try to update my sites regularly when needed, which is a huge job, but it's my hobby and I like doing it.

At the moment I am at the point of refactoring all websites again, but this time it's gonna be completely different, a whole new architecture which makes everything modular. All settings can be changed using one or a few files and all websites will update automatically. No more editing 446 websites one by one, been there, done that.

I was born in Amsterdam, 1961. Son of a "stukadoor" (builder / renderer) and a housewife. Just average, hard working people.

I never had any problems at school, always high grades with only a little effort and heaps of friends. I was ready to conquer the world, but the military duty broke my winning momentum and when I was released after 16 months the situation was completely different: huge economic crisis and with 21 years I was already too old (and thus: expensive) to enter the job-market. But I lived on my own and had to pay a high rent and I needed to do something, so I got stuck in simple work, production, night shifts, a lousy job but wonderful collegues and good pay and I stayed doing that for a long time, it was a safe solution.

After that I must have had at least 10 other jobs and I just didn't fit in anymore, I was unable to cope with the daily routine of having to shave every morning, wear a tie, act as if I liked my fellow workers and my boss etc. etc. I had become way too cynical for that kind of life.

But when I was around 40 and the boys were a little older I managed to get a huge job-opportunity and I made the most out of it, I was a manager of a pet-cemetary and later became the executive of all 4 pet-cemetaries in that company. After 5 years another huge opportunity arose and I became chief-administrator on the financial department of a large Dutch company in the funeral business.

After doing that for 10 years I left the ratrace for an off-grid life with my new wife on a farm in Portugal and that's where I still am, happier than ever before.

I am a romantic, artistic, sensitive person and I love poems and good song-lyrics, I think that poetry is probably one of the most powerful ways of bringing messages over, to communicate in a way that can give an extra layer to what you want to say.