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For a brief, glorious moment a couple of weeks ago, I was convinced I had cracked the code of personal web design.
My creation lived at evesunfilte.red. The domain name alone felt like a triumph—a sly, slick domain hack that rolled off the tongue. But the real masterpiece was the aesthetic. I had spent a couple of hours tweaking a WordPress theme that looked like WinMX. For anyone who didn't spend their early-2000s late nights illegally downloading MP3s over dial-up or early broadband, WinMX was the king of dark-mode peer-to-peer file sharing. It was all deep, moody greens, metallic silver headers, compact fonts, and an unmistakable sense of low-fi, underground cool. My site looked sleek, retro, and aggressively authentic.
There was only one tiny, soul-crushing problem: the rest of the internet refused to acknowledge its existence.
Somewhere deep in the code—whether it was a rogue setting, a stubborn TLD quirk, or a broken plugin—the site had declared total war on the outside world. Robots were completely blocked. Search engines were sentenced to treating the domain like a radioactive hot zone, refusing to be able to index a single page. Worse still, whenever I tried share a post on social media, the previews would not show. For a site designed to be, "unfiltered", it had managed to filter out the entire global network.
I spent all morning trying to access the robots.txt file, screaming into the digital void. Eventually, the frustration won out. I hit the nuclear option.
I deleted the entire site. I cancelled the WordPress subscription. There was even the ultimate marketing miracle from WordPress: a full refund out of the domain registrar for evesunfilte.red. The WinMX dream was officially dead, buried in a digital landfill alongside Limewire and Napster.
Which brings us to the present, and to the shiny new plot of digital real estate you are looking at right now: jordypops.me.
I’ll be the first to admit it: compared to the moody, industrial hacker vibes of the old site, this new one looks… well, a little flamboyant. It’s bubbly. It’s bright. It looks kind of gay. If the previous site was a dark, smoke-filled basement listening party, jordypops.me looks like a pop princess's backstage dressing room. It's got a distinctly camp, soft-focus, pastel-adjacent energy that feels almost hilariously opposite to what I originally intended.
But you know what? It actually works.
Google can find it. Social media shares will actually generate a pretty little link preview with a title and an image on the second attempt. The web crawlers will be throwing a full-blown party on the Blogger server, and for the first time in a couple weeks, my most random words are actually visible to the world wide web.
It’s a work in progress. I’ll tweak the CSS eventually, and maybe on a new template, tone down the sweetness, and maybe inject a little bit of that old retro edge back into a layout once I get comfortable, but for now, I’m leaving it as is. Function wins over fashion every time—even if fashion currently looks like a gay bomb went off in a layout editor.
Welcome to jordypops.me. It might look a little silly, but at least the robots are invited.
My creation lived at evesunfilte.red. The domain name alone felt like a triumph—a sly, slick domain hack that rolled off the tongue. But the real masterpiece was the aesthetic. I had spent a couple of hours tweaking a WordPress theme that looked like WinMX. For anyone who didn't spend their early-2000s late nights illegally downloading MP3s over dial-up or early broadband, WinMX was the king of dark-mode peer-to-peer file sharing. It was all deep, moody greens, metallic silver headers, compact fonts, and an unmistakable sense of low-fi, underground cool. My site looked sleek, retro, and aggressively authentic.
There was only one tiny, soul-crushing problem: the rest of the internet refused to acknowledge its existence.
Somewhere deep in the code—whether it was a rogue setting, a stubborn TLD quirk, or a broken plugin—the site had declared total war on the outside world. Robots were completely blocked. Search engines were sentenced to treating the domain like a radioactive hot zone, refusing to be able to index a single page. Worse still, whenever I tried share a post on social media, the previews would not show. For a site designed to be, "unfiltered", it had managed to filter out the entire global network.
I spent all morning trying to access the robots.txt file, screaming into the digital void. Eventually, the frustration won out. I hit the nuclear option.
I deleted the entire site. I cancelled the WordPress subscription. There was even the ultimate marketing miracle from WordPress: a full refund out of the domain registrar for evesunfilte.red. The WinMX dream was officially dead, buried in a digital landfill alongside Limewire and Napster.
Which brings us to the present, and to the shiny new plot of digital real estate you are looking at right now: jordypops.me.
I’ll be the first to admit it: compared to the moody, industrial hacker vibes of the old site, this new one looks… well, a little flamboyant. It’s bubbly. It’s bright. It looks kind of gay. If the previous site was a dark, smoke-filled basement listening party, jordypops.me looks like a pop princess's backstage dressing room. It's got a distinctly camp, soft-focus, pastel-adjacent energy that feels almost hilariously opposite to what I originally intended.
But you know what? It actually works.
Google can find it. Social media shares will actually generate a pretty little link preview with a title and an image on the second attempt. The web crawlers will be throwing a full-blown party on the Blogger server, and for the first time in a couple weeks, my most random words are actually visible to the world wide web.
It’s a work in progress. I’ll tweak the CSS eventually, and maybe on a new template, tone down the sweetness, and maybe inject a little bit of that old retro edge back into a layout once I get comfortable, but for now, I’m leaving it as is. Function wins over fashion every time—even if fashion currently looks like a gay bomb went off in a layout editor.
Welcome to jordypops.me. It might look a little silly, but at least the robots are invited.
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