Blogs and Websites, Gaining Traction
Some links on the state of personal websites and blogging:
Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter archives, hoping that they’ll arrive before all their content is lost for good. For those who were using Twitter primarily for ephemeral chatter, all this isn’t that tragic. But for others, all their posts, conversations, and connections on the social network were a significant part of their online identity. They are about to lose a place on the Web into which they put a huge amount of time, attention, and energy...
So how about we make 2023 the year of the personal website? The year in which we launch our first site or redesign our old one, publish a little more often, and add RSS and Webmentions to our websites so that we can write posts back and forth. The year we make our sites more fussy, more quirky, and more personal.
--"The Year of the Personal Website"
In those days, it was really simple. You could sign up for a free site on GeoCities, Yahoo, Blogger, Diaryland, or any of a number of free hosting sites that allowed you to set up your blog, get going with a WYSIWYG editor, and send your thoughts out into the world.
For those who were a little more adventurous, you could purchase an actual domain name, pay for website hosting, and go for it that way...
Bring back personal blogging in 2023. We, as a web community, will be all that much better for it.
The real web is built on links. Hyper ones, in fact. Links you can share on your website. Links you can send to your mates. Links to pages that can be indexed by search engines so you can find things again (in theory)...
The real web, the small web, the indie web is amazing. Don't give Facebook and the rest of these clowns your content. Don't give them the time or your attention. Get a blog, a website, a Mastodon account, something you control, and share links to cool things you find.
My only quibble (and I believe I've noted this before) is that personal blogging / having a personal website needs to be easy for regular people. If we're going to really push this personal web thing again, blogging shouldn't be inaccessible to people that aren't bent towards wanting to mess around with markup and code. I happen to like that stuff, so building this was fine for me. But there are other people with other thoughts that should find it ultra-easy, even frictionless, to build a site and a blog. To that end, here is a list of resources for doing so from Robb Knight:
Micro.blog - $5 a month, has cross-posting to a whole load of places Wordpress.com - Free weblog.lol via omg.lol - $20 a year also includes a >Mastodon server, pastebin, profile page, now page, and some other cool things Bear - free Neocities - free Pika - free Eleventy if you want to dig into code and run your own thing.
Tagged: blogging, technology,
