Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website
31 comments
·February 22, 2025Angostura
croisillon
i agree it was very enticing to get started, OTOH having an email address linked to a particular ISP meant people not daring to change it and having to update their email everywhere
badgersnake
If they have any kind of comments box it’s pretty ambiguous as to whether or not your personal home pages is illegal now in the UK.
adzm
Shout out to my favorite one-joke website, https://www.sometimesredsometimesblue.com/ which has remained a constant in my life over the years and has never let me down
dmilicic
I don't remember the last time I had so much fun building a web project than working on my personal website: https://dmilicic.com/
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).
FreesiaGaul
I 1000% stand behind this. When I was thinking how I was going to make my personal website personal - I really had to think. One of the great charms in "websites of the past" is all of the neat gifs and unconventional formatting. It has really inspired me in making mine (it's still under construction at freesiagaul.com).
Of course I'm not amazing, but frontend should feel like art, because that's what it is.
vaylian
I love the animation on your start page. Well done!
bix6
That was a fun read. Love the default theme and ability to swap themes. I recently deleted IG so maybe it’s time for a personal website. The world needs more 5 course meal generators :)
croisillon
oh thanks i missed that, the hours i spent on the CSS zen garden!
laurentlb
I expected to see an "under construction" animated gif, but what I found was better.
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.
ksec
I think the addition of "comments" on webpage is more of a cruse than a blessing.
victorstanciu
It is! For the latest incarnation of my blog I forwent comments in favor of a simple mailto: link at the bottom of each post which prefills the email subject with the post's title. I've had significantly fewer interactions with readers this way, but they've also been much more meaningful and insightful. There is a performative nature to public forums of any kind--and HN is not immune to this--that stifles any genuine discussion, or drowns it in a sea of attention-seekers.
Yes, I am aware of the hypocritical irony of complaining about online comments in an online comment.
famahar
This is a simple and great idea. I do something similar with my website. My newsletter is just a list of emails I have in a .txt file. I email to everyone when I write a blog post and we chat through email exchanges about it. The interactions feel more in-depth, and as you say, less performative as the exchange is just between us. Now I'm thinking of adding an email link at the end of every blog post with the blog title.
a-french-anon
Personally, I wouldn't consider a blog without a newsfeed usable, newsletters are the wrong tool IMO (select push vs pull available to everyone without maintenance).
(In Ballmer's voice) RSS! RSS! RSS!
mojuba
And not a word about discoverability?
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.
Maken
Nowadays your "blog" in Facebook has less chance to be discovered by actual humans than any random self-hosted blog.
benrutter
I don't know if I fully agree with your "centralization always wins" take- I think factually you're right, but that's ignoring the fact that most countries apply some kind of anti-monopoly laws that break up centralization.
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)
tomsmeding
A lot here depends on how much you care about discoverability. If you want to earn money off your website, then sure, you care a lot about discoverability. But the post in question is about creating, about having your own space, about art. Sure, having other people look at your art is cool, but it isn't necessary to do art.
If you want people to look at your website, ask them to.
vaylian
> And not a word about discoverability?
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.
Ferret7446
They were also horribly inefficient and promptly got outcompeted and outselected by centralization, about as unceremoniously as small tribes got dominated by the various historical empires.
vaylian
Inefficient by which metric?
nunodonato
don't forget Webrings :D
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yakshaving_jgt
For what it's worth, I don't think Instagram has much discoverability. Not anymore, anyway. The only content you can discover is lowest common denominator stuff. Thirst traps, cute animals, influencer crap, etc.
mojuba
Mojuba's law says: "Over time, everything tends towards mediocrity" :) which is exactly what you described as lowest common denominator, it's the same thing.
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.
yakshaving_jgt
I think that’s right.
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.
lynx97
[dead]
20 years ago in the UK most ISPs gave you a little bit of web space free with your account - and an email box of two. One of the sad changes that happened is that this has gone now.
It used to make it really easy to have a cool little website. I used mine for a simple blog - now gone.