@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I approve! That’s how I learned HTML (version 4 at the time and XHTML shortly after) and making websites, too. Some of them are still made like this to this day. Hand-written HTML. Hardly any <div> and class nonsense. I can’t remember with which editor I started out with, but I upgraded to Webweaver (later renamed to Webcraft) quickly. Yeah, this were the times when there was just a single computer for the whole family.
Free hosting on Arcor, Freenet and I don’t know anymore how they were all called. Like this author, I uploaded everything via FTP. Oh dear, when was the last time I used that? And I had registered plenty of free .de.vu domains.
Being on Windows at the time, everything was ISO-8859-1 for me. No UTF-8, I don’t think I’ve heard about it back then.
Later, I wrote my own CMSes in PHP. Man, were they bad in retrospect. :-D Of course, MySQL databases were used as backends. I still exactly know the moment I read the first time about SQL injections. I tried it on my own CMS login and was shocked when I could just break in. The very next thing I did was to lock down everything with an .htaccess until I actually fixed my broken PHP code. Hahaha, good memories.
I swear by Atom or RSS feeds. Many of my sites offer them. I daily consume feeds, they’re just great.