Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)
matthiasott.com
matthiasott.com
Mine is: http://www.jaruzel.com (yes, I know it's not SSL'd!)
EDIT: Would love to also set up a blog roll with other HNers. If anyone likes anything on my site link me yours! Would love to chat and share and link to each other's sites!
Currently completely static and handwritten HTML (except the generated download indices) but I do intend to add some sort of publishing thing to it at some point.
I generate it as static HTML with Hugo.
Both are generated with Hugo (https://gohugo.io/).
(Bought this domain way back in college. One of these days, I might finally shell out the money to get a trendy <myrealname>.co just because.)
I use the awesome Lektor static site generator and publish to Netlify, which is one of the best products I’ve used in a long, long time.
One question: I really like your Wave widget at the bottom of each page. How does the Wave mechanism work on the backend? It doesn't appear to send anything apart from setting a local cookie.
TL;DR Since I use Heap Analytics for basic user analytics stuff, I just use Heap's built-in click tracking mechanism to track "waves". Some ad blockers will block the analytics data from being sent — others let it through. It's been a while since I built that feature — I should probably update it to hide the widget altogether if you've got an ad blocker on.
As I wrote above, I use Netlify for hosting it, and I'd really prefer to use their analytics solution (more privacy centric), but it's a little too costly to justify for a personal site.
here is mine: https://reinkober-it.de I started it as a kind of learning-focused project but then it grew into a small Docker Architecture with a small blog, API usage to show off my projects & top HackerNews stories.
Built with hugo and using mpeg-dash with shaka player for videos (so that they load only when in viewport and pause and stop loading as they leave viewport).
Made with an ad-hoc static site generator: https://github.com/nathell/nhp
Blazing fast, my creature!
Started it years ago as a WordPress site, then Jekyll and now a Hugo generated blog.
I really want to start spending more time putting things in there, for me if anything, as a living repository of the things I do...
I do agree that one thing we seem to be losing is the "blogroll" concept, where people would link to blogs of friends, or recommended websites. We should start doing that again - I've got a task for my website now!
I also built some sites to 'advertise' my Javascript library[4] - but given that nobody in the world uses the library (or if they do, they're not telling me about it) I consider this, too, to be a personal site.
My other big project - building a whole constructed world with maps, languages, histories, etc[5][6][7] - is so 'out there' that I consider it to be "uber-personal" ... and yet this is the site which has led to many of my most important learning experiences (from building databases to designing alien fonts). It's also the site that got me into coding in the first place: if it hadn't been my massive desire to showcase my mad world to the dozen other people in the real world who might be interested in it, I would never have thought about becoming a professional web coder!
[1] - current poetry site - http://rikweb.org.uk/rikverse2012/ [2] - new poetry site (very much under construction!) - http://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/ [3] - learning blog - https://blog.rikworks.co.uk/
[4] - Scrawl-canvas library homepage - http://scrawl.rikweb.org.uk/
[5] - Kalieda Encyclopaedia (main site) - http://rikweb.co.uk/kalieda/index.php [6] - (incompleted) Beta site for the Gevey language - http://gevey.rikweb.org.uk/ [7] - (incompleted) Beta site for the Ewlah Lands (maps!) - http://lands.rikweb.org.uk/
Not much to see, yet, but there's actually some content not linked from the front page.
That's exactly what I'm doing right now :). Email address is not exactly as encouraging to reach out as a simple comment box, but I've had a hunch that the small possible upside is just not worth the hassle, and your experience seems to confirm that. Thanks!
However having comments encourages people to leave low-effort responses like "good article, thanks". Email-only provides a kind of filter for low-effort replies.
Rantings about Hemp, Raspberry Pis, games, and whatever else im doing, so far.
As my personal knowledge base I love to use Joplin[3]. I wanted to write my blog post with Joplin, too! I wrote a small script to generate the blog articles from Joplin notes and wrote about this in my first blog post [4].
I also plan to have some kind of linkage site. The biggest problem is to revised my large bookmark collection and pick out the best ones. I probably should just begin with new cool stuff I stumble upon. Secondly, I would like to have some kind of feedback system (comments, activitypub, ...) but without any (or at least too much) server side code and without using some external provider.
Btw, the site is also available fully decentralized via dat. Yeahh.
I'll have to clean it up and put it on GitHub this weekend!
It's mostly at the intersection of technology and philosophy. There's an RSS feed.
If you don't like either
https://blog.randomstring.org/2018/09/21/why-computer-securi...
or
https://blog.randomstring.org/2015/11/23/a-musical-analogy/
then you probably won't like the rest, either.
What i'm saying is that your site hit a string in me. I like it.
But the really good stuff is in my pen-and-paper journals...
It’s a React SSR site, and the posts are bundled into the code when the server starts up. Markup is Jekyll compatible. More details here: https://github.com/bfdes/bfdes.in.
Also built in Hugo and deployed to Netlify. I keep going back and forth rebuilding it using Pelican or Nuxt.js; it's hard for me to leave well enough alone.
Only a few years old, not so much on there yet, but.. Some good things: List of movies/series watched since 2012 (which I consult all the time), huge quotes collection, fav books and writers, some of my maths art, some pages of (basic) maths I was learning, guide to bash, Miles Davis disc-gig-ography, Romance languages compared, etc..
I mostly started it while learning Python and job hunting and sadly have not got back to keeping it up. For me, it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with a worthwhile topic and good narrative.
Also, I started it when I had a less-than-fulfilling job and now that I have much more interesting work it’s tough to build the energy for side/personal projects worth writing about.
And I kind of want to rebuild it from scratch (of course). It’s a statically generated site with Pelican and while building it I have often found myself just wanting to be able to make better use of straight HTML over RST/Markdown.
There's a mix of photos of street art, other things I've seen, a bit about technology etc.
I miss the old, quirky web and I'm trying to let this blog be old school.
HN readers will probably be most interested in https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing
edit: I also have a couple of projects to play with: https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#interactive
Looks clean, I like it. But please use semantic HTML[1] for screen reader users (and SEO), e.g. `<section>` instead of `<div class="section">` and headlines instead of paragraphs.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Semantics
Built with Hugo: https://gohugo.io/
I mainly use my blog to motivate me to learn new things in machine learning/data science. It's been a pretty effective tactic!
(One suggestion: sometimes the context of the post isn't actually as obvious as it seems to us. For eg., the post about the Stan Vim plugin makes no mention of what Stan is, and it's a slightly annoying name to DDG properly. A link to the Stan language's site would've saved me - the reader - a minute and some annoyance.)
Built with Gatsby, MDX and Theme UI. Yes, overkill!
Mostly dev stuff, but also some general tips&tricks and an "adventure" section. Built with hexo static site generator. RSS included ;)
I recently decided that it was high time to start publishing my essays, stories and other stuff related to life and work; mostly as a reminder to myself and maybe leave something useful for my children and others to read.
Over time I think I'll end up with an interesting mix of things on here.
I post about random projects and interests of mine, and linking to interesting Github projects. I'm currently building a Proliant Gen8 NAS with OpenMediaVault, and going down the home automation rabbit hole (see /r/homeassistant / Lovelace software) so I might post that on there.
I also flashed a Vu+ set top box with OpenVix[1] and hooked it up to a huge satellite dish, another project that I should share details of. I have a habit of gathering bookmarks in OneNote for future projects which I really should share.
Made with hugo and hosted on netlify, static with no javascript. It's a bit empty but I'm still working on it.
Topics: frontend, bootcamps, motorcycling, traveling
Incidentally, I'm investigating simple ways to display my favorite photography on my site, but I've not figured out yet a good UI or system for that.
For resizing and metadata stripping, try the "sharp" npm package. It's fast, well documented, and based on libvips.
For pulling metadata, try the "exiftool-vendored" npm package (or just use exiftool directly as a CLI).
For presentation, know that srcset is now widely implemented. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed...
I meant presenting. Like, should I do a fatty grid? Organize by trip? Etc.
As for srcset I use it on my blog but something about Hugo causes my images to rotate.... Sometimes. Lol.
Updated to have Simeville, a css village. Gonna remake it in Canvas though.
I was really bummed going from a site where anyone could easily see how it was made and read the source code via view source, to Gatsby/React where its unintelligible. But to have animations persist across "pages" it was necessary to switch. This is what index.html and layout.css used to look like:
https://github.com/simonsarris/site-simonsarris/blob/faf3eb7...
https://github.com/simonsarris/site-simonsarris/blob/faf3eb7...
Wrote a piece last summer that's much in line with this one :D https://dominik.net/reviving-ye-olde-personal-home-page.html
Mine: https://www.pcmaffey.com
Hand-made HTML and CSS plus a little JavaScript.
Published with Hugo static site generator.
Sending love to https://indieweb.org/
Todo: Add a page called ”Links” with links to other independent sites I like, similar to the ”Blogroll” sidebars from years ago.
Been running it since 2005 (and posting mostly regularly.. about 1200+ posts now but the vast majority of that was me posting about tech news back when I had first started it).
It's a mix of tech, design, photography and generally whatever personally interests me at the time from fido2 security keys to NAS storage for my photos and so on. I recently wrote a bit about how I built it: https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this-website/
I use Known, a platform I cofounded, which supports the Webmentions / IndieWeb ecosystem described in the article. https://github.com/idno/known
Begin doggerel:
Those hackers who explore my digi-self
Just might discover words that they enjoy.
With poems, games, translations on my shelf
There's something here for every girl and boy.
https://brokensandals.net (philosophy, book reviews, programming challenge walkthroughs & other tech posts, my music)
https://amtunlimited.github.io/2020/01/20/nothing-is-finishe...
Has been around since the early days of the web.
In case it's too green, the site also works fine with CSS disabled.
Amazing piece btw
The blog is mostly about Tech/Activism/Writing/Design. I also keep a page on /setup about what I use and /projects on what I build.
Personal websites are neato. I can draw myself as a cute ghost girl and put whatever I want on my site in whatever structure I want (although it's mostly just articles/blog posts/technical documentation and occasionally art) and nobody can stop me.
Also shoutouts to https://neocities.org for being an excellent repository of personal websites, and the various sites under https://tildeverse.org/
Blog is coming soon™.
I would happily implement web-mentions or whatever (I added rss feed when someone requested it) but I don't know exactly how they're different from comments. I have comments that link back to the comment-authors website, is that a webmention?
0: https://github.com/Sequoia/sequoia.github.com/blob/rewrite/s...
Writing regularly on a variety of topics that I'm working on/interested in including online marketing, ethical web and such.
How do people keep up with each other, private site-wise? Should I just add an RSS feed or something?
I've been blogging for 10 years now. I post mostly about tech stuff, trips I take and whatever else is interesting to me. I recently switched to using Ghost to write posts, but exporting to a static site.
Sometimes I wonder if I should do more with it, but I don't know what.
The concept of the picture was funny, but not sure about the execution.
I'm currently deciding on an analytics package, so excuse the several JS calls that are present—though they all strive to be relatively unintrusive.
RSS: https://danshumway.com/rss.xml [0]
Video Content: https://peertube.danshumway.com
I use very similar tech stacks for https://loop-thesis.com and https://distilledjs.com. I should probably get around to setting up a Mastadon instance as well, but I'm not completely sure I want one yet.
----
[0]: I realize that some people would prefer full RSS feeds, but I just haven't had time to add one, and because the site has no tracking or JS requirements it's just not my highest priority right now.
Just revamped mine at the weekend and now much happier with it. Trying to better split out my research from public engagement and other miscellanea.
I have actively blogged and maintained it for many years.
Homepage is https://www.anthony-mills.com/
If you trust Cloudflare, it's a pretty easy way to handle SSL, though it doesn't give you the same level of control over your SSL cert without a paying tier.
Mostly just tech related things
I have not posted anything recently. It was plain html and css previously, I moved to Jekyll this year. I am trying to post more often (3 unfinished draft). I am kind of afraid that the standard of articles won't be good. IDK
Been blogging (with some gaps) and maintaining a personal website since 2003. Moved all that data from WordPress to Ghost last month.
I hope personal websites make a comeback. My current site has been going since 2007 and is in Hugo.
- content is focused on my mix series of relaxing, eclectic lazy sunday soundtracks
- static website built with Middleman and hosted on Netlify's free tier. It also uses Turbolinks which is an underrated library that provides great performance benefits for close to zero effort
- needs a minor refresh and a few design tweaks
Following a 90/9/1 rule [1], where most of the users are consumers, it becomes difficult for "average" people to contribute content when you've raised the bar so high that they need to have a personal site. That level of overhead will hinder many people. It's not just the technical aspect either -- just the problem of choosing a color scheme or layout is a roadblock to many people. When you can just type a post into a short input box or in a webform and just let Twitter and Facebook worry about the "publishing", that's a much lower bar to cross. And when you lower the cost of entry, you'll have significantly more participation. I think that's the main draw of the current centralized services -- the bar of entry is low enough that the proverbial mom or grandmother can now use Facebook (or whatever) to post their own content.
Unfortunately, that leads to one of the downsides of the centralized services, which was your point. Now that 9% of people who want to contribute content and learn about how to do it (design their site, wire up the services, etc...) now don't have as big of a potential audience.
Which I guess we have the same point, just from different angles (consumers vs producers).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
Their crude design has led to the fact that every iteration of the past 30 years is pretty much trying to solve the same problems: discoverability, interactivity, easy-of-use, scalability, security, performance and so on. We try to fix things without breaking the world.
More to the point, HTML, HTTP or URI don't give you the tools to actually promote your content. They just enable you to put a node in a large network of hypertext. That's it. HTML is meant to structure content by adding cues / tags in such a way that machines can grok that content. But it doesn't tell you how to interpret the content. HTTP just allows you to connect a client to a server and exchange HTTP messages. It doesn't define what's in those messages. And a URI is simply a spec that defines an identifier, not what it defines exactly nor how things could or should be linked.
It's only when the Web became this pile of hypertext, too large to index by hand, that the current denizens of the Web started to pop up. Google is ultimately nothing more then a fancy telephone book. And social media are at their core just a single big shared wall where everyone can tack on messages.
Arguably, building a website is the least efficient way of reaching a large audience, simply because the core tools of the Web weren't inherently designed to do that.
Hence why we've seen how SEO and marketing hackers are at odds to game search indexes and their algorithms. It used to be that their influence was limited to the space telephone book publishers reserved for advertising. Isn't it that then strange how SEO marketeers aren't effectively not doing things that different from what their forebearers did in the 1950's?
The big power of the Web isn't the fact that your page can be found just by Google or shared via a social network. That's a reductionist form of looking at what you can accomplish.
The true power is that you can connect to others without needing advertising companies or moloch telephone book publishers.
See, the same crude robustness provided by those open standards allows you to create your own network of hypertext between you and many friends. The Web is not a single glob of content; it can be many globs of content that are interconnected and can transform as human relationships and interaction transforms. It's not a static thing that needs to be held down by incumbents merely because mom and pop don't know how to write HTML.
You can perfectly have your own web presence and be part of a centralized service as well. Try looking at principles such as POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE) You can have your cake and eat it at the same time. That's totally possible.
See, if Google and big tech try to slay URL's; they effectively disconnect themselves from the Web. They isolate themselves. And that's a bigger risk to themselves then it is to the survival of the Web. Because although the Web is huge, it's resilience is found in it's ability to adapt and evolve as provided by the core design principles that underpin the entire tech stack.
Everything else is mainly sugar and sprinkles.
This is the disconnect between the modern commercial web and the real web. Personal sites aren't usually about gettting views, making money, or grabbing attention. Those are profit motives.
Personal sites are about putting something out there you care about. It doesn't matter who, if anyone at all, sees it. It doesn't matter if your site only has 90% uptime. Or if it looks weird and only works in some browsers. The only thing that matters is if you like it.
On the "old web", content freshness is what the creator wants it to be. Old articles can still be as relevant five years down the line, given that the author updates it as needed. Cool and weird stuff can still be cool and weird after the fact, doesn't depend on word-of-mouth or algorithms to "live", doesn't have to be "released" on a schedule, and doesn't have to compete against other creators. It just exists for people to stumble upon eventually: the when doesn't matter.
But most people will still need some kind of validation to make it feel like they're not just putting information out into a silent, gaping void. You don't have to stoop to Twitter style hot takes to do this, but some acknowledgement from the outside world is still desirable.
Back in the day, there were "guestbooks" you could sign and webrings you could join, linking to other related sites. Blog software had user comments and blogrolls built in from Day 1. Unfortunately spambots and useless pingback notifications killed the discussion sections.
Pingback is old and well known so it gets a lot of spam. But webmention is still new enough it's still useful. Sure, it'll eventually get spammed out to but this is the lifecycle of web-objects. Gotta get use of out them while they're young and not terrible yet.
And as rightly said by superkuh > "Personal sites are about putting something out there you care about."; someone somewhere will share it and someone somewhere will find it useful.
What's missing is the context of the time when they were popular. They were new and had a high-tech aura about them.
Nowadays making a website doesn't differentiate you in a good way unless you have a super creative way of coming up with the website and a lot of content to fill it with.
Nowadays you have to take it to the next level. What's a skill that's beyond the reach of most people? This could be why PCB business cards are so appealing. Because it's a thing most people can't do and if you can do it it shows your technical prowess. I think that's my personal web pages were popular back then and why they won't ever be popular again.
Here's mine: https://jamiesnotes.com
Love this! Although the response rate of people online is extraordinarily high, it's nice to get an extra datapoint about whether you're buried in emails right now and to not expect a response right away.
I use ActivityPub as both the broadcasting mechanism and the mechanism to obtain comments for my personal site. It also allows people to follow my account on my blog from the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc).
So far, not much engagement (mostly my fault for not posting too much). But a working proof of concept. It isn't easy to do though, and I skipped all the other tech to do the AP support first (webmentions, rss/atom).
I've read a lot recently about the Activity Pub protocol and I've been following Mastodon / Pleroma for a while but never really made the jump
https://cjslep.com/c/blog/this-blog-is-federated
It's pretty bare bones and has had significant downtime due to Mastodon spamming "account Deleted" activities, which would crash my little server. I hope I have now fixed it.
I am not sure that any of these ideas themselves will make a comeback, but a remix of them might fill some gaps that exist today, especially with discovery.
My attempt at a social discovery network of sorts, for content websites: https://cruton.app
It's a Reddit-style presentation, but instead of votes, it ranks URLs purely on traffic and qualitative metrics. Add it to your site if you want to help me test it out and improve it :)
Since the demise of Google Reader, I've never found an RSS reader I'm entirely happy with. I hope someone does more to update the concept, perhaps with additional support for the Fediverse to fully use the features of projects like WriteFreely https://writefreely.org/
Yes, there's no SSL.
I blog about tango music, which probably won't be of any interest to this crowd. https://tomaskohl.com/tango.
Planning to start a more techy blog, and looking at static code generators. Too many of them! :)
At some point I'd like to spend some time building out a larger body of writing to post, maybe a gist-like snippet list.
My music reviews and podcast: https://BassTourist.com
Really need to write a new post, I just can't think of what about.