
A Love Letter to Personal Websites - devbas
https://www.vanschneider.com/a-love-letter-to-personal-websites
======
neilv
One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some
people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's
pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web
frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc.

My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation
of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve URLs for some
open source contributions. It's also personal, with none of my professional
work on it.

I'd bet the vintage look has cost me a few business opportunities, but not
every aspect of my life has to follow this year's commercial fashion. Shoot me
if I ever give _my little personal site_ a stock React look, or a big dynamic
anti-Web framework, or third-party CDNs to mitigate bloat hosting costs, or
something like that. :)

~~~
mandarg
For what one person's opinion is worth, I quite like the look of old-style
text-and-hyperlink websites, so long as there's something interesting to read
on them.

A canonical example: [http://bactra.org/](http://bactra.org/)

~~~
iCarrot
Obligatory motherf*cking website saga:

[https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

[https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/](https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/)

[https://bestmotherfucking.website/](https://bestmotherfucking.website/)

~~~
pureliquidhw
Blocked at work for adult content. Whoops!

------
unicornporn
> written from years of thinking on the subject

While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of personal websites, this
post did nothing for me. So many words and so little to add.

These texts are slightly related and did something more:

[https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-
my...](https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my-website-
is-a-shifting-house-next-to-a-river-of-knowledge-what-could-yours-be/)

[http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html](http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html)

[http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/](http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/)
(don't miss part 2 and three)

~~~
unicornporn
Almost missed the best one:

[https://pastebin.com/raw/zHCBBTVu](https://pastebin.com/raw/zHCBBTVu)

------
teddyh
More than two years ago, I wrote this:

[…]

What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s
large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like
GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those
sites all had content and linked to each other. _This_ is the web which the
Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it
worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to
your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People
making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to
other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and
easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots
of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which
in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine.

Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place
to simply place information, no _incentive_ to simply make a web page about,
say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about.
Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As
I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously
updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point
about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as
part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was
basically the _only_ thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so
that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a
larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco
Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby
validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google
could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These
pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not
allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather
people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s
sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.

—
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456)

~~~
knzhou
I have a personal website. It's very easy to forget that 99% of people have no
interest in making their own personal sites, never had, and never will. That's
not a bad thing. Making your own site is a weird, niche thing to do -- a lot
of work for no concrete reward.

In the past, the internet was dominated by people in that very strange 1%. The
advent of social media didn't remove them, it just let everybody else in. The
few that want to make their own sites still do, using platforms or tools that
are far more convenient than a decade ago.

------
Kye
Something even more pernicious about social media: if you build an audience
there, you're trapped. You can easily convince yourself a lot of people care
about what you say right up until you link to something more substantial off
the silo.

The ActivityPub fediverse is a lot better about this, but even there I might
get one visit to a linked page for every ten boosts.

Getting people to look at a website in 2019 is _hard_. It used to be easier. I
could get 1000 people to look at a blog post on just about anything. Now all
the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away.
You might get lucky and land on a long tail keyword that Google ranks you for,
but search traffic is unpredictable even if you go out of your way to research
keywords.

I get 140k views a month and tons of retweets/likes on Twitter when I'm
active. The website has a few posts with some search traffic, but nothing like
140k.

~~~
movedx
> Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry
> them away.

This is very true. I've got a YouTube channel and I'm developing premium
training solutions on the side of it in Podia... video is king.

People want high value (to learn something) wrapped in high quality and
compacted into a 5-10 (max) minute video. And they want it for free... sigh.

Remember, though, that Google is the #1 search engine, so blogging (and SEO)
is still important to drive traffic towards your videos. That being said
videos will take over.

I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I believe it said in the next
5-10 years at least three billion people are coming online and they want
video, because video is how they want to consume knowledge.

I think people should start picking up a camera.

~~~
Kye
It sounds like you're talking about one specific kind of content: educational
material. That's not what I make or have any interest in making.

And there is no way I'd get on camera even if I wanted to do video. I do not
believe video will come to dominate such that text and audio won't still have
a place. I personally can't get much out of most non-fiction videos, and I
know I'm not alone. I didn't even watch more than 0-2 YouTube videos a month
until I found ContraPoints and got pulled into lefttube.

~~~
movedx
> It sounds like you're talking about one specific kind of content:
> educational material

I personally make educational videos, but that's not what dominates on YouTube
:-)

> I do not believe video will come to dominate such that text and audio won't
> still have a place.

They will have a place, for sure. Podcasts are still rising in popularity -
they're a great platform for transferring knowledge and value and also
debating.

> I personally can't get much out of most non-fiction videos, and I know I'm
> not alone.

People learn in different ways. Most people are visual, however, and
video/interaction/workshops are the most popular means of learning for an
incredibly large portion of the population. Source: married to a teacher.

~~~
a3n
> > I do not believe video will come to dominate such that text and audio
> won't still have a place.

I almost never follow links to video, because you can't scan them for
relevance and quickly bail.

~~~
movedx
Sounds like a poorly managed video, then. Loads of options for making it
easier to find specific parts of a video. Google even includes that ability in
searches now.

------
Rafuino
Finally bought myself a personal domain but am now currently agonizing over
how to design the damn thing, let alone what to actually put on there!

~~~
neilv
You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5):

    
    
        <!DOCTYPE html>
        <html lang="en">
          <head>
            <title>Rafuino's site</title>
          </head>
          <body>
            <h1>Rafuino's site</h1>
            <p>Welcome!</p>
            <p><i>Under Construction</i></p>
          </body>
        </html>
    

It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on
gray, but you could CSS that in. :)

~~~
btbytes
This is good advice. I'm collecting websites like this ("handmade") here -
[https://www.btbytes.com/websites.html](https://www.btbytes.com/websites.html)

My own website is compiled together with a python script, but aesthetically
close to what you describe.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Consider adding [https://www.gwern.net/](https://www.gwern.net/)

------
verisimilitudes
I agree with the general idea, but dislike the WWW. I find it fundamentally
poor from the start. I'd rather make the comparison to having one's own node
on the Internet.

I rent a server and I rent several DNS names. Unfortunately, neither of these
things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from
me, but it's not happened yet. Through this, I'm able to host a website, a
Gopher hole, a Finger service, my own email, and I'll host FTP, IRC, and other
things as I want to. There's not much of a limit. This is nice and freeing. I
decide how everything's presented and done; I use my own server software in
some instances.

I can agree that having one's own website is an introduction to this manner of
freedom, though.

~~~
saagarjha
> Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would
> prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet.

It’s one of the more resilient platforms out there, at least considered to
company-hosted social media sites.

------
pier25
For the past 4 years I've been too busy and have only written a couple of
articles on Medium[1]. Thankfully I'm ending my current job which has consumed
my time, energy, and soul for far too long and I want to get into the habit of
writing again. This time on my personal site, not on Medium.

[1] [https://medium.com/@Pier](https://medium.com/@Pier)

~~~
whitehouse3
I’m glad to hear we’ll see more of your writing. I dove deep into front end
frameworks after a lot of research last year. Your clear and thoughtful
comments about React helped me a lot.

Congrats on making a positive career change.

~~~
pier25
Thanks for your nice comment, I really appreciate it.

------
aledalgrande
I think (hope) in the next years we will see an increase of personal sites.
With products like Ghost, it's easier for everyone to make one and it doesn't
involve a ton of coding. You can focus on the content and own everything. I
wonder if we'll be able to connect these personal sites together like a
crowdsourced Medium?

Edit: I'm talking about self hosted Ghost

------
floatingatoll
If you want to make a website accessible to any human but essentially
invisible to search engines, configure basic authentication to require and
accept any username and/or password, and then set the auth description to
“Enter anything to continue”.

Human beings will enter anything and read your article, with the browser
caching the credentials for a while, but the vast majority of search engines
will treat the 401 as “indexing not permitted under law”, to a degree that
your site might not even be returned as a result at all.

Robots.txt doesn’t have the same effect and is soundly ignored by many
malicious/uncaring web spiders and tools, unlike 401.

It seems like the smallest thing in the world, but it’s why forums that
require you to login to search are so safe against harassment - as long as
they block web spidering!

------
jimktrains2
Ive found myself spending a bit more time on YouTube recently and I've been
curious as to why. I've come to the conclusion that I much enjoy consuming
something that someone, or at least small group of people, care about and find
that a lot of good information can be shared. (It also helps in that regard
that I've been watching wood ajd metal working channels.)

So, why not websites and just ddg or Google subjects? The more I thought about
it and paid attention, the more I realized that top results are all large
sites with next to no content and finding those personal websites, those
labous of love filled with information is neigh impossible.

I miss being able to find those smaller sites organically.

~~~
nullwarp
I've found many great sites recently using
[https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/) which definitely feels like a search
engine of old

~~~
jaclaz
As a side note, and JFYI, there is seemingly from the ashes of DMOZ:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ)

a new kid on the block:

[https://curlie.org/](https://curlie.org/)

------
Rerarom
At least in academia the tradition is still going strong.

~~~
ht_th
Unfortunately, with the advent of electronic learning management systems and
corporate content management systems in universities that are as much as
required to be used, this seems to be declining fast. Currently I work as a
lecturer at the same university I studied at twenty years ago.

Then, almost every teacher and researcher did have their own website behind
"~username" on the open web. For most it was just a list of publications and
courses they taught. For these courses they often made an overview page with
links to all kinds of interesting material, from lecture notes, old exams,
literature, to tools, thoughts, and curiosities. Some went all out and made a
personalized personal web page with all kinds of interesting content. I spend
a lot of time browsing and reading and exploring these pages when I was a
student. Now I wished I had downloaded them all.

Now, no-one but some old-timers do have a "~username" web page. Courses and
their materials are hidden away behind the walls of the learning management
system we use. Their publications are visible via the library's repository and
bibliographical system. For the rest, everything that is on the open web on
the university's servers is published via the corporate content management
system with rules and regulation what and how to post and most employees do
not have access to edit anyway. Many researchers are part of some academic
social networks like researchgate, but that's outside the scope of the
university's servers.

What is left is for those who are interested to share to setup their own
websites elsewhere. Not many do, unfortunately.

~~~
Rerarom
Yup, I've noticed that too. Even worse, some younger people would consider it
to be a tremendous burden to write their own HTML/CSS/JS.

------
crustacean
Can anyone give advice about how you built your personal website(s?) while
having strong professional interests in multiple areas? I’d be really grateful
to see an example.

I have a career in tech and also a career in music. My professional networks
in these areas don’t overlap. I don’t think everyone responds positively to
the dual career thing, although some definitely do.

Just make two sites and don’t link them? Get a stage name vs a tech name?
Create a unified portfolio as a creative technologist?

~~~
maverick2007
I did something a similar except instead of music I'm a huge theme park fan
and wanted a portion of my personal site to be dedicated to my trips (instead
of hosting the pictures on Facebook or the like) so I decided to separate out
the roller coaster portion of my persona and put it at a subdomain of my
personal site
([https://coasters.joshimbriani.com](https://coasters.joshimbriani.com) for
those curious) whereas my main site remains mostly tech focused
([https://joshimbriani.com](https://joshimbriani.com)). I've been pretty
pleased with the setup for now seeing as how I can nerd out about coasters
without alienating the other half of my (non-existent) audience

~~~
kevingrahl
Hey Josh!

Did you realize that your feed.xml seems to only link to

    
    
        http://localhost:4000/
    

instead of linking to your website like it should?

~~~
maverick2007
Thanks for the heads up! I thought I had fixed that problem but I guess it
regressed somewhere along the way but it should be fixed now (minus some
Cloudfront cache updating). Thanks!!

------
mirimir
I've done many personal websites, and the discussion forum or two, over the
years. And more or less without exception, the lack of engagement has been
disheartening. But (of course, I guess) most of them were Tor onion sites, so
silence was predictable.

But even on clearnet, promoting personal websites is nontrivial. How does one
do it?

~~~
saagarjha
Put things that would interest others, and let others find it. If you’re
feeling brave, you can link to it in an appropriate context. For example, in
this thread sharing my own personal website might be relevant:
[https://saagarjha.com](https://saagarjha.com)

------
podviaznikov
There are so many cool personal sites out there. I'm constantly amazed by the
quality and creativity.

I publish now from dropbox. Ofc using my own tool
[https://docs.montaigne.io](https://docs.montaigne.io). It's already helped me
do add content more freequently

~~~
ambivalents
This looks cool, thank you very much for sharing. However, I tried signing up
and got an error message from Dropbox: "This app has reached its user limit.
Contact the app developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to
increase their app's user limit."

~~~
podviaznikov
Ok, enabled Dropbox for more users. You can try it now, if you want!

~~~
ambivalents
Giving it a spin. Thank you!

------
pelagic_sky
What's interesting about this is Tobias, the author, earns a living making an
awesome skin for wordpress called Semplice. I've been using Semplice for the
past couple years and as a designer who used to code, it makes making my
portfolio site a heck of a lot easier. There's still a lot of time sunk into
it. I just don't have to fuss with some of the details. So in theory, he helps
me keep my personal site alive, even if I am now using the crutch of WP.

------
p4bl0
I love my website too, and personal websites in general. Mine is also
handcrafted (well, I have a few scripts to help me but all the HTML and CSS
are written by hand). I also maintain and host a little service that allow my
friends and friends of friends to have and easily manage a personal website,
in particular for those in academia (but outside CS).

------
100-xyz
If you would like to be easily found by people geographically near you, you
can add yourself to its-near.me We are currently looking for personal websites
to add. Let me know if you have any questions. [https://its-
near.me](https://its-near.me)

------
boobePhuu7iet7i
Loving the irony of having links to Instagram and Twitter in the footer of
that post :P

~~~
sushid
Not to mention as someone above mentioned, that the guy makes a living selling
WP themes.

------
joelrunyon
In an effort to get people to bring back the blog, I started
[https://startablog.com](https://startablog.com) \- to do just that.

We actually offer to set up people's blogs for free here -
[http://startablog.com/free-blog](http://startablog.com/free-blog) (and are
hoping to help 10,000 people do it).

I know WP blogs are not always the favorite of the HN crowd, but Wordpress has
been super accessible (esp for newbies) once things are setup, so hopefully we
can remove that first (slightly technical) obstacle for the crowd that's used
to doing something on everyone else's platform.

