It's October 21, 2024, at 23:34. As I write this, I'm seated at the large table at Extra Practice in Rotterdam, surrounded by scattered A4 sheets and numerous open windows on my laptop. I'm typing this directly into a code editor, and the book is continuously rendered using Paged.js in my browser whenever I hit save.
It's a strange and messy process to make a book by making a website but also feels entirely fitting for this project. This book is just HTML that had been patched together. It's somewhat beautiful that I could send this 781 kB file to you and you could open it in your browser and read it as a book and print it out if you wanted to. This is actually how Kristoffer and I have been collaborating on this project for the past few months. There's a secret folder on my website that I rsync this file to and then I'll write to him and say, "hey, I made a change" and he'll open it up in his browser and see the changes. So basically we've been making a book by making a website.
But before we got to that point, we spent months collecting submissions from humans like you through another website. The submissions all accumulated in a spreadsheet, on yet another website, and I wrote a python script, well several scripts, to take all the submissions and turn those into HTML.
For a long time it didn't look like a book at all and if we needed to update something semantic, I had to write another script to make that update across 700 <li> elements. But to be honest, I love working in such a direct way. It really feels like drawing in that way, everything is in front of you and because it's so visual you can jump from element to element like drawing a line and suddenly moving your pen to a different corner of the page. I couldn't think of a better way of making a book about exploring the internet.
We couldn't have technically made this book without so many open source projects that were made by people I've never met and probably will never meet–my gratitude goes out to them. Python libraries like BeautifulSoup (what a name!) and of course Paged.js, without it this book would still be a website.
I also wanted to thank the Extra Practice family for their emotional and practical support and this big table of course. And also all the humans who submitted their websites to this project. It really feels like a beautiful handmade web has begun to form over the last few years and I'm glad to be a part of it.
It's getting late so I think I will turn off my computer soon and take a rest from this index.html for tonight. I hope you will enjoy the book. Sorry and not sorry for the errors and typos. Taking all this mismatched HTML and making one document from it was a chaotic process, but HTML is always so forgiving. This feature of HTML always gives me hope for the future of the web.
The energy in me sees the energy in you,
Elliott