Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website
localghost.dev
localghost.dev
At that time angelfire.com used to give free webspace. My brother got hold of a pirated version of CorelDraw and setup a fan website of his favorite rock band Junoon, which incidentally is still online: https://www.angelfire.com/pa/JUNOON
And then when my brother met the band at a concert and they actually recognized him due to the website. I guess first time we realized how impactful internet is going to be.
In Germany you unfortunately have to dox yourself with stuff like this, and I really dont want people to know my address.
I know people will argue "thats only for business websites", but that's far from the truth. It's for every website that might(!) has a business aspect. So I couldn't even name products on a personal blog as that could be seen as advertisment that I got paid for...
I hate this country so much.
The law is mostly targeted at media and to some lesser extend businesses. The law is not enforced, and would be hard to enforce for individuals. For individuals, the law contradict multiple privacy laws, possibly the GDPR, and it might also conflict with some past rulings on the article 11th of the European Convention on Human rights. This article guarantees freedom of speech without persecutions, and one way to guarantee that is through anonymity.
My non-lawyer opinion is: people setting up an "Impressum" page on their personal websites in Germany are over-interpretating the law.
This is also the opinion of german lawyers[1]: "Impressumspflicht schön und gut - aber muss wirklich jeder Webseiten-Inhaber ein Impressum auf seiner Website führen? Ganz klar: Nein. Die Verpflichtung ein Impressum auf der eigenen Webseite einzubinden gilt nur bei geschäftsmäßigen Online-Diensten. Im Umkehrschluss brauchen Betreiber von Websites, die ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen kein Impressum auf ihrer Homepage einzubinden."
Regardless of this, if you still want to put an "Impressum" page just to be safe, you can buy a "Postfach" from the deutsche post for ~€20/year and use that as your "Impressum" address, this way you don't have to doxx yourself.
[1] https://www.e-recht24.de/impressum/13095-impressum-fuer-die-...
To register a .de domain you need to give your address and legal name. And your national ccTLD is usually the only one that you are sure won't get pulled under you because there are some legally binding rules around it unlike .tv or .me
It used to make it really easy to have a cool little website. I used mine for a simple blog - now gone.
I have my email grandfathered in by my ISP (Virginmrdia) but they don’t offer it to new customers.
I use it with my own domain name that redirects to the Virginmedia box, so not tied to them.
Maybe one where comments only show up after I manually approve each one.
Of course I'm not amazing, but frontend should feel like art, because that's what it is.
It is still huge work-in-progress and the amount of effort is way above reasonable amounts and it's going to be a problem once I want to sell the apartment, but I'm proud of myself, because I'm at the point where you can slowly see where things are going.
https://github.com/freesiagaul/site-ascii The code is super bare-bones for now, but it's been a great learning exercise for someone from an EE background
Yes, I am aware of the hypocritical irony of complaining about online comments in an online comment.
(In Ballmer's voice) RSS! RSS! RSS!
1. Most of the Old Web site experiences were one-and-done. We checked out a website, then checked out the next one on the webring or Geocities neighborhood. Unless the site "looked" like it was updated with news, we generally didn't re-visit the site, or really even remember it. Your old website could feel just as disposable and stale as the average social media post.
2. RSS and algo-free chronological feeds won't return us to a time of civility. I have never stopped using RSS. But the system isn't designed to support a feed where 10% of the sites post 90% of the content. The experience is awful, there is no way to order things so as to see a diversified feed. RSS of course also flattens web pages into a lifeless scroll of text, defeating the purpose of home-made web pages.
3. Webdev is too complicated now compared to a time when your ISP gave you an FTP folder and Notepad was all that was needed to write some HTML and display some images. Modern webdev (code editor, SSL, hosting, mobile-ready CSS) creates an adverse selection problem where the people with the time and skill to make websites, already do so in their work and thus create the most boring websites imaginable....code-heavy tech blogs or wispy 'digital transformation' thought leadership.
The best part by far is people going out of their way to get in touch & let me know that the found a post of mine interesting or useful.
I think in the context of this article, 2020 is very recent. But otherwise, yes I agree.
Incidentally, my own site started out in 1999 as a personal site, became a poster for my writing, then back to a personal site and is now a poster for my tutoring. All the old content is still there, just with a different emphasis https://richardtaylor.co.uk/
I grew up during a bit a transitional period of the internet. My earliest memories involve playing Flash games on Newgrounds, reading about Bionicle lore online & listening to Cryoshell and Daughtry, thanks again to Bionicle. I also used to hang out on quite a few internet forums. While this is not quite the "personal website" internet advocated for in the post, it's a lot rougher and edgier than the Facebooks & Instagrams we have today.
Amongst my peers it's not really 'normal' to have a personal website - I only know one person IRL who does that, and we met because I noticed he was coding in Haskell while I was performing live music at a pub!
I do fear that personal websites will become less and less common - young techies these days basically grew up in the big tech walled gardens without any chance to experience the rougher, non-commercial web of yore. The idea of going through all the trouble to get a website going may seem pointless in a world where everyone you know is on Instagram.
Not having your own website is an opportunity missed for techies especially, I think.
Any attempt to bring back home pages must essentially include a way to discover them. Search engines has been dead for that purpose for more than a decade.
If you want to give back autonomy to publishers, your solution must also grant the same autonomy to commenters. You need to enable all people to control their content, whether they are original posters or pre-posters and commenters.
Not at all. On my webpage/blog, if I have comments enabled, I absolutely have the right to erase your comment or just not make it visible in the first place.
Imagine you published a blog but the hosting provider could delete it any time they want or just not make it visible in the first place. It would be unfair because you are paying money, but readers/commenters of your posts pay with their effort and if they have no guarantee of you honoring your informal obligations they won't be doing that for you.
Personally, I've just been keeping a running list in my notes for cool personal sites I find / subscribing to the RSS feed if it has one, mostly discovered from exploring the interlinking web in this space.
[0] https://www.lkhrs.com/blogroll/ (not my site but an awesome personal site)
The simple solution could be another search index that hasn't been commoditized like Google has, but I wonder if a manual curation approach might lead to higher quality? Something along the lines of a weekly digest of personal sites that are interesting/unique/fun. Process could look like:
1. Users submit their personal sites for review, accompanied by some blurb/tags. Essentially something to make the cost of submission > 0.
2. Site admin reviews submissions once a week and either select their top X favorite, or just remove any low quality/slop submissions and shares the rest.
Pepperidge farm remembers.
I am working on this - https://personal-logs.vercel.app/anime
The spirit of doing what you want is exactly what inspired me to do it, it's not the best nor the fastest web but it doesn't matter, I simply wanted to do it in a different way (Flutter & WASM).
The garden theme made me smile. Now, I'm considering redesigning my website.
I removed the links from my website a decade ago, but I enjoyed looking at the section on the page. Not sure what I'll do about it.
The web went the way it went because ultimately centralization wins both in terms economics and discoverability. You host your blog (or rather "blog") on Facebook for free and get a chance to be discovered by strangers, for better or worse.
Not saying it's necessarily a good thing, because now you are at a mercy of corporate censorship that isn't even required to abide by the users' constitutional rights and freedoms. They can limit your speech in any way they like and it's what they do: their platform, their rules.
On the other hand, without centralization the web is expensive and not very discoverable. Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about, in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
If you want people to look at your website, ask them to.
The internet became dominated by a few large websites not just out of economic necessity, but out of the specific economic conditions that are mostly in the US (large companies and few anti-monopoly enforcements)
This is true in practically everything if you think about it. Car and furniture designs. Social networks. Politics. Art, cinema, even music. At first there's novelty and excitement, then comes commoditization and mediocrity, almost like a law of nature.
In my case, I think my Instagram experience would be improved if I could automatically block every profile which advertises a link to their OnlyFans.
Alas, frustration with this experience also counts as engagement to their telemetry, so this won’t ever get better.
The article ends with a list of web sites that you should check out. This is how discoverability worked in the early web days and that is how it can still work. People link to other pages. The joy of "surfing the web" is about starting somewhere and then walking off into some unforeseen direction to discover new places on the web.
Links were placed by humans. They were curated. They were organic. And they can still have these qualities today.
That way, if the chain is solid enough, we can bring back the notion of "surfing the internet"
I'm... about 14 months in this time - a digital garden, not a blog. Still updating several times a month. I think I got delisted by Google at the tail end of last year (not that I ever got many hits). I'm quite happy with that.
I write notes on what interests me in the moment, occasionally I go back and edit, sometimes I send links to friends. No plan, no goal, only whim. Obviously if you're writing for attention mine is a terrible approach, but then... if you want maximum attention, should you be writing at all? Shouldn't you be on a video platform?
The small web will always, I think, be at the margins of the internet for all the reasons you list. Dandelions growing in pavement cracks.
And another important thing, don't worry about google ranking. There is nothing you can do about it. Create as much organic traffic as possible. Leave out all the rest.
I've been building websites my whole life, but my main niche is music, and one of my big sites is kpopping.com
Now I have the best database, bar none, in this niche for a decade now. It's not even close. But instead of gradually ascending to the top of google's results, my webapp has to rely on donations and subscriptions to survive because Google cannot get enough of content from the hindustani times and purple wordpress blogs. They even literally had pornography ads for months on a kpop site. It didn't matter. 20M+ a month. Welcome to google and the main reason nothing gets built.
seo researcher shocked about it: https://x.com/paulkimio/status/1550532282288508929
my twitter rant about it: https://x.com/ohgoshnotthat/status/1894487513642791270
Agreed. And so what?
My friend maintains a tomato garden on his roof. Are his tomatoes ever going to win a greenhouse competition? No. Did he find it a worthwhile use of his time to grow them? Yes.
Building a website should not be a resume talking point, nor does it have to strike a telling blow for 'free speech', whatever that even means in a world where the rich and powerful are obeying in advance.
Yet, cacti thrive in the desert, uncaring about the opinions of others.
> in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
Inherently, the Web doesn't carry "maximizing an audience" as a maxim. That's an expectation that the Web's denizens have come to believe in as a matter of principle: the only valuable reason to put anything online, is because you intend to cater to an audience.
That doesn't exclude owning a personal website that you'd just peruse for your own sake. In fact, the author writes as much:
> You can write at length, ramble nonsensically, and people can choose to read it or not. It’s about putting things out on the internet for yourself.
Like, sure, there are platforms where you could share cooking recipes. But maybe that's not something you want for yourself, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to attract undue attention, and you just want to keep them in your own quiet corner of the Web, for yourself.
You might want to write for the sake of the craft of writing, and use the Web as your medium, rather then paper. Others happening to stumble on your work, is just a by-product of your choice to publish thoughts on the Web.
Maybe you don't care about search engines, and if you need someone to find your work, well, you can just hand them an URL.
From your perspective, all of that may sound horribly inefficient, and that's true, it is inefficient and not the right way to do things if your express goal were to cater to large audiences. But that doesn't make it any less valid an option to approach the Web.
> There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
Well, my argument is that the Web, such as it was, experienced an Eternal September with the advent of social media and mobile devices. Suddenly, everyone could reach an audience with nothing but a smartphone. And that notion caused millions, billions, flocking to those few central platforms that catered to this apparent want, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Whereas, do you thoughts and intentions really need to be shown in front of an audience of billions, just because that's possible now? Of course not.
Wanting to be like a cactus is perfectly valid, giving your thoughts a quiet spot in some corner of the Web you can call your own, not having to worry about likes, favorites, comments, shares or clicks. As long as doing so caters to your own intentions.
My thinking is people get nostalgic about the old times and excited about counteracting the Big Tech Corp forces.