Not quite the same thing, but I set up my own website for my guitar tuition business. A Web designer friend said it's a waste of time and I should just do a FB page. I've since built up a decent client base that have discovered me by searching in the local area and I was able to tailor the site to
present myself and approach exactly how I want. Most importantly I was able to attract people who AREN'T on FB, when otherwise I'd only attract a specific kind of person who is still on FB. And I don't want that.
This is something I’ve been thinking abt for a while but haven’t started mainly for security concerns of self-hosting. Any good recs for places to host your own site? As a dev it feels like you either expose your network to the world or tunnel through one of the cloud monopolies and neither feels ok
I'm so here for this. I miss people carving out little works of love on the digital landscape. now it's all proverbial high rises, billboards, and enshittification
If you enjoyed this blog consider subscribing to aftermath! We are 100% worker owned and reader supported. If you hop on before the 29th, you can get one month for a dollar! Wow! https://aftermath.site/products
Aftermath is great. And what were you gonna use that five bucks for, anyway? An energy drink? Give your kidneys a rest and support some fantastic writers!
Also goes for getting away from Spotify/Bandcamp/SoundCloud - you can host your own music with a pretty slick interface like this https://futurecabaret.com/
This is created with a really slick static site generator called faircamp by Simon Repp. Set up some config files and run the app and you get a cool site that you can self host. https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/
I've finally, finally started blogging again and it feels like re-discovering a long-lost hobby. They're largely connected to my business, but I have a ton of ideas to branch out.
I still remember the pre-web 2.0 days, when everyone had their own little Geocities site with art & articles
Just popping back in to say HELL YEAH, SAILOR SATURN. She's the one who validated my love for Anything But Big Light as a kid, and propelled my SWEET JESUS, ANYTHING BUT BIG LIGHT, PLZ GIVE LAMP to the forefront of my adult home decor decisions. We all love a Smol Queen with a Big Glaive.
Really drives the point home to have a "sign up with your human email to read this article" pop up on your article about how the Internet sucks now. You're 100% correct, websites sending me useless emails is part of that. Amazing.
more people need to run a blog!! Neocities is my go-to for hosting but there's plenty of options, and even as a dummy who's intimidated by HTML and CSS, there's lots of resources out there, and it's better to have an awkwardly coded blog than to have social media be your entire online identity
wait i could have made my neocities my bsky address this whole time?? damn
also you're right i should do stuff with my neocities site. i don't mess with html and css too much but i *love* messing with it. reminds me of my teen years making custom png signatures
yeah, they added some functionality for making it your bsky address not too long ago (and then changed it to a different way of doing it, so everyone had to adjust) - there's a special tab for it in your site settings!
i've been making personal websites for 25 years or so. I've never once had anything to actually post on them though. Lots of "coming soon..." and "under construction" kind of things. I'm just super boring and a terrible writer. Still, design is fun.
I have the same question. Blogging on my website seems pointless now with all the scrapers, though it's still active with my professional links and appearances info.
I had my own website for like six years. I'm not very computer literate and I never had enough to pay someone to help me. Google refused to let me put adsense on it and eventually I had to shut it down.
Definitely want to do it again, though! This time with some help, lol.
For many years my personal website was https://Releasethedogs.com. Then I forgot to renew the domain and before I could do it (only lapse an hour) it got bought up by cyber squatters where it’s been in limbo for over 15 years.
I think my concern I have with making my own website is the cost and difficulty of coding... I don't have much brainpower for either, but being able to make my own shop website would be fantastic
been thinking about this a lot. maybe it's just nostalgia, but I remember the internet used to feel like a much larger, freer place before big platforms fenced it all in. it'd be cool to go back to that.
I built hospitality websites in the early 2000s. Every site was custom. They each had their own unique look based on their company personality and marketing. Some were beautiful. Some were, looking back, kind of hideous (but the clients liked them).
My personal, niche website is old enough to vote and features the finest hand-crafted, artisanal, ca. 2002 HTML possible. (I scrape by on the last free WYSIWYG editor I could find and upload with Cyberduck.)
Which is hilarious because micro blogging (Twitter et al) started as a solution for people who had personal sites that no one ever saw. Which is even worse with Google's broken rank brain
I was getting into building my own Wordpress theme pre-COVID and then lost steam. I’m going to try to motivate myself to build and maintain something even if it’s my dumb little improv thoughts
Its odd that the web has more users and more artisans of every sort than ever but there just doesn't seem to be many people using websites as a form of creative output.
There's a whole generation of people who have never experienced the Internet as anything but a series of walled gardens.
Hey @amanda.omg.lol can I tag you here? I learned about https://omg.lol through your recent blog post about it. I have a free https://about.me page, and I know some people like https://linktr.ee. Is omg the same as those? Or is there more? Should I swap my about page for an omg page? Chris, care to chime in?
I can’t handle any other way, which is why my own website has been dead forever because I never had time to actually bother making one after I decided to let my old blog cobbled together from PHP and MySQL die
love the article, just commenting to say i also had a sailor moon geocities page, didn't know we'd all find each other 25+ years later... anyway who wants in on my sweet web ring
2000s web was the golden era. there's still a lot of indie web out there but it's buried beneath the corporate slop web, and our search engines are not built to actually search the web anymore, they're just answer engines now.
yes gita, preach! I owe my entire career to getting hooked on tinkering with html in the late 90s. I remember old versions of Netscape came with a WYSIWYG HTML editor much like Dreamweaver, and it’s still usable today as a part of the SeaMonkey project!
this is probably a dumb question, but other than more options/customizability, how is a personal website (on something like Neocities or another host) better than social media, from an ownership/reliability standpoint? aren't you just as dependent on them as you would be with Bluesky or MySpace?
(please note I'm genuinely not trying to fight I loved your article, I'm seriously debating making a Neocities right now, I'm just curious about that point in particular)
My current old man rant is about missing websites! I used to read blogs and movie news websites and dumb websites that posted funny pictures. I had an RSS feed (RIP Google Reader), swapped articles with friends, and loved when rarely updated sites posted. It fucking ruled.
Being able to write what I want, when I want is priceless, but an underrated aspect is that I also get to decide the focus for any visual looks or themes I want the site or articles to go with!
Lovely and thought-provoking piece! And yeah, it made me realize again that despite my own efforts to broaden my net perspective, I still visit just a fraction of the sites I used to visit.
It's what made me launch my own 'zine last year, wanting to have some more personal to me out there.
What do people do for hosting? At work it's obviously CICD pipelines at enterprise scale, I've no idea if people just use blob storage or something like that.
Good article but sad there's no mention of neocities or the rest of the growing old web movement or its practices, which'd direct people to accessible resources to building their own sites.
I make visual art but like the old web peeps are the community that made me want to build my own website in the first place and release me from the issues that the article was talking about, which is why I was sad abt them not being mentioned. I liked the article though don't get me wrong.
I genuinely think you should write about this experience, which not everyone is going to have had, and share it with others. Just like Gita used their platform to talk about their thoughts and experiences, rather than yours. You can share your thoughts somewhere other than Gita's article.
I’m an extremely amateur photographer with no delusions greatness or ambitions to like, seriously showcase my work. Just a little side hobby. I made myself a portfolio with Wordpress though and it was so cool and felt way better than just collecting more Insta followers.
you’ve said it well—ideas throttled and arranged or discarded to increase the power/ fortunes of billionaires. enough. personal websites are a, the (?), way to go.
It turns out I have one. If you’re inclined, take a gander. If you’re feeling it, tell me what you think.
I did. Cloudflare -> S3 -> Hugo. It's not particularly hard to get going, especially now that AWS no longer charges for 403s (which I'm surprised didn't become an attack vector way way earlier).
I did the origin and caching setups myself, though Cloudflare has a "put s3 bucket here" option now.
I made a plaintext html blog that I update just whenever I feel like it with longer form stuff. And what I found the most delightful is that by putting my email address on there, I actually got a LOT more people than I expected just emailing me for nice chats about my posts.
Just curious, how did people find your website? Did you advertise it somewhere? I took a look at it, it’s wonderful and I want to try something like it.
Point being it's nice to have your own little website to dump stuff on and I wanted to show you don't have to learn a shit ton of coding (I know plenty, I just deliberately chose to make a pure content blog) and you don't have to religiously update it every week or whatever.
that's awesome! i've had a personal website for well over a decade. it's gone through numerous changes in that time but i've hand-coded it and love enhancing it and making it *mine*
Nothing kills one’s desire to make a personal website more than doing that as your day job. I’m guessing that is why I always see my UI/UX/Designer peers often using heavily-modified, clean templates just so we can get our stuff up fast. I always admire those designers who do go the extra mile.
I’m sure many out there are like me and did these awesome, custom sites fresh out of college — but by the time you’re 36 and have spent 9 hours staring at a dozen Figma files, sat through six meetings and begged a client *not* to make their entire site neon teal, you lose the will to do more work.
I very much remember in school during the 90s the idea of everyone having their own home page other ppl will visit and then thinking about how corporatised and centralised eveything later became.
when i started my blog about a year ago or something i discovered webrings that you click and it brings you to the next personal site in the ring. there’s different “themes” to the ones that exist too. it was such a neat and cozy find in the drab internet age of uniform social media accounts
i spent hours just clicking through them and looking at all the unique sites i came across. many of them felt like customized myspace pages or early 2000s sites that wanted you to stay and explore. i agree more people should be making a personal site
This has been a low key side effect of the Blaugust event I run each August, attempting to encourage folks to start a blog so they have a place on the internet that they actually control.
My own blog of some fifteen years has been my permanent home on the internet. https://aggronaut.com
Restaurants that want to feed me need to have a site that includes (at minimum) their hours and an easily available menu. Facebook is not for you, pizza shop. You’re alienating non Facebook users.
every time I get shunted to another proprietary CSS framework after years of people just going "here's how you do this neat thing!" I feel three more brain cells die
Speaking of which... I made my own first website in 1995, "TimeWork Web." It actually generated a fair amount of traffic. A few years ago, I built a restored version, https://timeworkweb.com -- including an archive of the old stuff -- which mostly sits there unvisited. Oh well.
I've had https://kudzufiles.com for 20 years. Every once in a while I retreat to there and post something. It's a lonely little outpost, but it's my lonely little outpost.
I've been building up and tearing down my website for 20 years and feel like I'm stuck in a stressful, yet dull, mash-up of the Ship of Theseus with the Myth of Sisyphus.
My website is eternally disappointing, albeit in slightly different ways.
Went to a talk by a comic artist answer questions of newer people. The only thing I could add was "Make a website!" So many social media sites have come and gone, losing contacts between the swaps, etc. And, these days, newsletters seem good.
i'm trying, gita!! i gotta get mine up... i have some stuff put together with some horticulture and comic stuff but i never feel good about it. i need to just slap it out to the world anyways and just fix it later... i want a house on the information superhighway...
https://neocities.org/ is the platform i've been using for hosting a messy personal site; it's probably not perfect but you get 1GB free storage and there's a $5/month supporter tier if you find yourself needing more than that
https://www.w3schools.com/ is full of free tutorials on basic HTML and CSS stuff - they do sell certifications but about 90% of what i've learned has been scraped together from here or just searching for what i'm trying to do on Q&A sites like Stack Overflow
these are just the things that have worked for me and there's a ton of other options for both of these! there's no real wrong way to get started and at least in my opinion, it's worth it to get the ball rolling and learn along the way even if it's not perfect
two thumbs up for w3schools, awesome site. I'll throw in css-tricks.com as well - the guides are excellent. I use the flexbox one _all the time_ for responsive stuff! https://css-tricks.com/guides/
Unfortunately, W3Schools became infamous over a decade ago for having undeservedly great SEO but terrible content. (Maybe they've cleaned up their act since then?)
super fair assessment; W3Schools has been handy for pointing me at the basics but i do for sure have to tinker to actually get the most out of the information. MDN has come up in that tinkering more than once and is 100% an important part of the toolbox!
FWIW, I'm a programmer in my day job. I know plenty of HTML and CSS. But if I'm going to create my own website I want to be focused on the content I create, not the design of the actual page. I was hoping for some free/cheap but mostly easy tool to handle that stuff for me so I can focus on writing
oh, awesome - you're better equipped than me in a lot of ways for this stuff, then! i don't have a big compiled list in front of me at the moment but i know there's plenty of sites on Neocities dedicated to sharing templates you can build pages off of, to help streamline the design part of things
For a long time I was ending up at the same websites WHICH WERE ALL KINJA POWERED so I was staring at the EXACT same website for years, just with a different header
I hand-coded my first web page in 1994. I loved using tools like FrontPage when they came along but by the Teens things were too complicated for me to continue.
I used Arachnophilia as my editor after learning HTML from an actual book in / way too long ago / and learned graphics and photo editing through PaintShopPro ... god my first pc died a spectacular SE Asian planned obsolescence death ... then I customed a Dell (arrived complete w cow themed box)
Built a number of sites ... and the webrings! And DMOZ open directory project ... figuring out the embedded keywords to top the webcrawler function ... then PSP/MySQL broke my brain and everything got automated an algorithmed . Pour 1 out for DMOZ, Google's original source ...
Right?? Simpler times ... hexadecimal ... open and close ... *sigh* ... at least that esoteric knowledge made posting to online class message boards WAY more fun
Absolutely agree, and I really miss Webrings - connecting hobbyist and niche sites made the internet feel like a community.
When we got our first ISP in ~96 I discovered it had some web space. The idea of putting something on it was intoxicating. I’ve been working online ever since.
To be fair it's a little more difficult these days having to comply with regulations and shit. Back in my day I could send ya a cookie without asking permission first--still can but now it's against the law? What in tarnashion
I AGREE!!! Personal sites, especially ones just for fun, are so essential!! I came across neocities recently, which is like the spiritual successor to geocities, and near everyone on it are people and hobbyists who want to make personal sites just for fun
I love the idea but isn't this the question of the distribution? the platforms have the audience and the means to connect your creations (image, video, text) to people interested in it
OK but some of us have tried web dev in even small amounts and hate everything about the process 😭
I need a ready made platform to just post to because the rest is infuriating for me
How do we get people to our websites? Newsletters are the best way in my experience but even then it's hard to get ppl to click links to your site. YouTube and socials? Easier.
But then get ppl to check your site without going through socials/a newsletter? How? 😥
true story
1) the way Google has changed has made it nearly impossible to rank a personal website
2) at the same time most social media sites suppress outgoing links (bluesky being an exception)
but hey, doesn’t mean it’s not worth it - just means it’s harder to build a big audience
Do (a lot of) people still use those? I used to be a HEAVY rss reader person, but that died with Google Reader. I had used Feedly for a while too but for whatever reason, I fell off.
i’m making one right now and having a lot of fun with it - it feels nice to be a part of a somewhat intimate part of the internet with neocities and “web 1.0” development
I might just have to check it out simply because of the zombocom callout. When I found that website in the 90s it literally inspired me to make my own, which sadly no longer exists.
I hand coded my first website and all the ones that came after. The last one is still up even though I haven’t updated it in several years except to add a page when I finish a new book. Many of my design sales come from it still, a lot more than from the closed systems of faceborg and instagram.
Very well written. I too had several [terrible] websites hoping they’d stay up long enough for a random person to stumble across. What about the multitudes of text based multiplayer games that used to exist out there? Did anyone else also adopt an alien and battle other aliens with it?
This is so good and so true. I built my own site a few years ago when I realized how much of my work had disappeared: many shut down, others had CMS changes that sometimes stripped bylines or headlines. Just felt good to own my work again!
I did but then the host server vanished and never came back. And now everything is "pay twenty bucks a month for a site that we're going to heavily monitor for no reason and can randomly delete if you post anything we don't like"
Probably shouldn't say this because I'm nowhere done with it, but I'm working on an extremely light blog framework aimed at mid-level web designers that you can throw on top of an XAMPP-style installation (aimed at common low-tier shared hosting options), with ActivityPub integration.
social media’s benefit has always been its built-in audience compared to standalone websites — but using the two in collaboration like you guys do at aftermath is an excellent model def worth pursuing more broadly
as "unprofessional" as it looks i always think about making my website look like an old internet shrine. i learned html and css because of neopets, had many a website hosted on geocities and freewebs, made layouts for RP forums on avidgamers and proboards. it just feels correct.
There is something counterintuitive over how web hosting has got cheaper and web design has got so much easier, right at the time almost nobody has their own anymore
Comments
Currently in the process of migrating it to Next and adding OAuth but it’s still pretty nice in its current version
https://yasminmostoller.com/
She’s also on Bluesky
@yasminmostoller.bsky.social
1) lackluster reception to elaborate interactive promo websites in the 2000s & 2010s
2) dev bootcampers (like me) making personal websites that don’t capture the old internet magic. (I blame React and Bootstrap 😛)
My first website was on GeoCities. Good times.
posting on twitter is free
I still remember the pre-web 2.0 days, when everyone had their own little Geocities site with art & articles
also you're right i should do stuff with my neocities site. i don't mess with html and css too much but i *love* messing with it. reminds me of my teen years making custom png signatures
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/posts
Definitely want to do it again, though! This time with some help, lol.
Then templates arrived. They ruined everything.
https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3lazf2ljw5s2b
TLDR I'm doing my part!
There's a whole generation of people who have never experienced the Internet as anything but a series of walled gardens.
https://justatinker.com and https://justatinker.com/stjames
I've been working on a website for 5 years, and when a group of folks work together, a lot of great content gets made.
Now that it's just me, I find it hard to keep producing content alone.
Nothing more fun than collaboration!
checkout marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/
I have a site - currently a portfolio - and have stuff I want to say, just need to get off my ass and do it.
I have to buy the domain name, then the hosting and most of the time because my paypal isn't linked to a bank I can't pay anything subscription model.
It's what made me launch my own 'zine last year, wanting to have some more personal to me out there.
That was over 20 years ago though, and until recently I hadn’t even touched a PC in almost that long XD
It turns out I have one. If you’re inclined, take a gander. If you’re feeling it, tell me what you think.
https://LukeyoutheU.com
I did the origin and caching setups myself, though Cloudflare has a "put s3 bucket here" option now.
One of my posts blew up on HackerNews, that was a rough day, but it was a good example of why a plaintext html blog rules so much lmao, didn't go down
Unfortunately so did one upset CEO but well y'know they can't all be winners
https://RichardIPorter.com
🙂
Like remember web-rings and a million fan-sites!?
My own blog of some fifteen years has been my permanent home on the internet.
https://aggronaut.com
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com
https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
No one really makes an "upload your html file here" and nothing has adequately replaced flash either.
https://www.allyourscreens.com
My website is eternally disappointing, albeit in slightly different ways.
I enjoy my own web development as much as I enjoy writing fiction.
One of my biggest issues is everyone wants you to set up a damn store or subscribe for features.
I’m unsure of where to do my own web garden of stuff or how to do it.
Did not have to host my own bsky instance!
https://www.destijlmusic.com
https://www.jackcurtisdubowsky.com
(I'd consider exporting your data though)
https://css-tricks.com/guides/
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
No I'm not taking money off them for this, gotta share good resources!
Use MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web
You can also access it (and a bunch of other docs) offline using https://devdocs.io.
AT
ZOMBOCOM.
When we got our first ISP in ~96 I discovered it had some web space. The idea of putting something on it was intoxicating. I’ve been working online ever since.
https://www.reconnect.quest
https://wordvoid.net
I need a ready made platform to just post to because the rest is infuriating for me
https://nemusicdb.neocities.org/
But then get ppl to check your site without going through socials/a newsletter? How? 😥
1) the way Google has changed has made it nearly impossible to rank a personal website
2) at the same time most social media sites suppress outgoing links (bluesky being an exception)
but hey, doesn’t mean it’s not worth it - just means it’s harder to build a big audience
Definitely less popular than it used to be since people don't blog as much, but there's still a lot there.
I still use Feedly, and catch up with my feeds each morning.