Webshrines for People Poisoned by Micro-Blogging

Table of Contents
• Intro (You are Here)
• The Setup
• Profile
• The Body (Text)
• Stylising
• Images
• Conclusion

I’ve wanted to make webshrines for a long time but there’s an issue.

I’ve been poisoned by microblogging.

Trying to say anything I want to say in coherent paragraphs is beyond me. I’ve been shitposting for over a decade and most of what I have to say about anything is fragmented sentences.

After making my website, I spent over a year looking for how to make webshrines. I found other people’s webshrines. I found guides for webshrines. I found prompts to get me started.

But when I sat down, I felt like I had nothing to say. Which didn’t make sense cause I’d talked my friends’ ears off for hours. But asking myself “what do I like about Eremiel from Beyond the End” didn’t make me write a whole essay. I just went,

I like the scrimblo :)

So, I didn’t make a webshrine. I made every other page on my website, and the shrines stayed empty. I made some pages that maybe technically counted as types of webshrines; liveblogs, reviews, primers (which were mirrored from Dreamwidth), but nothing that felt like the idea I had of what a webshrine was.

To me, a webshrine wasn’t just any page where you talked about something – it was a dedicated space over-designed in a way that reflected your emotions about the piece. My liveblogs, reviews, primers – these all have a set template I use, so they don’t really reflect the personality of the work. I needed something that could reflect that personality, or I wouldn’t feel like I had made a webshrine. Maybe it’s a case of cringe culture just got to me and squashed the part of me that could have that fluidity to just express myself like that. Though, I felt more like I just lacked the graphic design brain that understood how to take that inner part and make it look good on a webpage. Which sounds strange when the bit I was stuck on was slapping a load of stickers everywhere. In my head, there’s an art to sticker slapping. And I just wasn’t achieving it.

Then, something just hit me.

If you’re familiar with my liveblog project, when I left twitter, I exported my data and ripped every thread related to liveblogging to display on my website.

What if I used a similar methodology to making a shrine?

TL;DR: Let’s just archive our microposts.