Forever Worlds
This website’s About and Explanation of the Ratfactor Feed pages have different takes on what this personal website is. That’s also touched upon here in the Cards under Why am I calling them "cards"?
A website as a "forever world"
I just read a blog post that resonated very strongly with me:
A forever world in Minecraft is the concept of starting a world in Minecraft single-player, and playing that for the rest of your life.
…your forever world, each time you play, is molded into a reflection of your mind. Each time you build anything, try to leave it there. Don’t destroy it, instead if you want to change something, mold it into something else. You can do this just 20 minutes to an hour each day […] and your incremental progress will show up over the many years in which you’re playing your world.
This is just about the best description of my website I’ve ever heard. It’s a "place" that has been under continuous construction by a single person for over a quarter of a century. It contains my personality and my interests and though I have certainly removed things from it, I’ve mostly been adding to it for all of that time.
All commercial services eventually die off, but a personal website can be nearly immortal. I can (and do) run this site locally off of tiny, low-power computers in the home. So not even an Internet connection is needed for me to use it and add to it.
Other forever worlds
As it happens, I can also relate to the literal Minecraft "forever world" concept. My family logged many hours together in a survival world on our family minecraft server and our buildings and creations there contain lots of memories.
(Note that you might want to consider a game in the FOSS game engine, Luanti rather than a Microsoft product, if you have a choice!)
I think there is some overlap with Seymour Papert’s microworlds.
My sketchbooks are also forever worlds of my artwork. In them, I can see my abilities, interests, and tastes change over time.
Strangely, my notebooks do not feel like a forever world. Despite the fact that there is so much "me" in them, they still feel like more of a reflection of the real world and not so much a world of their own.
Also: Digital gardens
Another metaphor that fits this concept really well is the "digital garden" and the act of "digital gardening". Maggie Appleton has a beautiful web page about this concept that I often return to re-read: