Ensala.fr started life in 2003 as a by-product of English lessons at the French National School of Art in Limoges. It served initially as a platform for comments, information and gossip about life at the school as well as a workbench for learning coding languages for the internet. All the pages are hand-coded from scratch - as you’ve probably already guessed by now!
French-language information about the school can be found on the rather cool official website - so if you are looking for up-to-the-minute news on what the school has to offer and what students and staff get up to, please go there.
Meanwhile, Ensala.fr has undergone constant changes, not just content-wise but also in terms of function. Usage has ranged from being a convenient repository of occasional announcements to a platform for experiments, feedback, embedded layers of help made for individual students or groups plus an accumulation of semi-private archives. Mostly about ideas rather than graphic presentation or aesthetics, the site continues today as a logbook of subjects to stimulate conversations or research.
Unintentionally this website has also become a record of my own changing styles in twenty-five years of teaching in an art school (for a brief summary, see here). Currently, some pages still bear the scars of trying to maintain momentum during the COVID lockdown period between March 2020 and Spring 2021.
All in all, this is very much an alternative vision of how an internet site can operate and no doubt will continue to evolve as needs change.