Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website
114 comments
·February 22, 2025neebz
eszed
I love your brother's site, so much. It looks like the web counter is still working, and that I'm not the only person from here checking it out, so I hope angelfire is ready for a bit of a "hug".
aosaigh
I wonder is this a sign of the times? I've (nearly ...) quit all social media and re-embraced my personal website. It's also under construction, but it's going to be the main place I update everything (work, personal, photos, updates etc.). I don't care if no one reads it. It's mine.
zwnow
I think its really nice to have an own "digital garden".
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.
mgraupner
Get a .com domain from a provider with Whois privacy and don't add an impress. Done.
zwnow
Wouldnt people still be able to just lookup who the domain owner is?
acatton
Granted, I'm not a native German speaker, but that's not my understanding of the "Impressumspflicht" law, if that's what you're referring to.
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-...
zwnow
This is exactly what I was refering to though. "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" can refer to anything. A shop where you sell stuff or a blog in which you ~could~ advertise a product, even though its a personal blog. People over here got sued over not having one in their YouTube channel. There are plenty of "Abmahnanwälte" (Lawyers) who'd happily sue you, if there is a slight chance that you could've earned a few pennies with your website. The actual laws do a very bad job at defining what exactly "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" are.
xingped
Why do you have to dox yourself in Germany?
u_sama
I think he is referring to this section 3 https://www.denic.de/en/content-pool/denic-domain-terms-and-...
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
mgraupner
If you are publishing from your own (German) domain in Germany, you will need to add an impress with your personal address.
LegitShady
And the AI scrapers love you for it, as much as a machine can love.
Angostura
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.
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
Angostura
Which makes it doubly odd that they are getting rid of it.
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.
ghaff
I suspect the support costs are greater than the advantages to the provider. And, in most cases, it's not like there are a lot of choices of ISP. These days also a lot of choices of free providers for a simple static website--GitHub, pages on Google Blogger, etc.
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.
praptak
TBH I wouldn't expose unfiltered comment boxes on today's internet anyway. That's guaranteed web spam plus a small but non-zero security risk.
Maybe one where comments only show up after I manually approve each one.
badgersnake
My understanding is that would be exempt from the regulations provided you ensure the comments are related to the content. But the legislation is super vague and IANAL.
benoliver999
I remember an old friend of mine moved to the Orkneys, and used the free webspace to set up a webcam and site so we could keep in touch with him. Back in the late 90s this was kind of mind-blowing!
rchaud
DMCA (and equivalent legislation in Europe) killed it. It was too risky for ISPs to allow users to have unmoderated, publicly accessible digital lockers that could be used for storing MP3s.
bicx
That’s how I published my first webpage. Mindspring, baby! And then I later upgraded to a much more sophisticated web host with a cgi-bin.
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
dzuc
glad to be of service
memhole
I hope you take this the right way. Seeing your work gives me so much more confidence in my own creativity. I showed someone at the supply store a rough draft I had and they were encouraging, but also said I’ve never seen anything like it. Which is both possibly cool and doubtful.
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.
anal_reactor
When I moved into my current apartment I had a difficult task. On one hand, I wanted it to look modern and sleek. On the other, I wanted it to be mine. It's my apartment, nobody else's.
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.
vaylian
I love the animation on your start page. Well done!
FreesiaGaul
Thanks, I appreciate it! :D I'm planning on making many more, and hoping as I get better I can make little ascii-characters look as if they're interacting with the site
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
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!
benoliver999
That's exactly what I do and it works great.
samename
Isn’t Hacker News a form of a comment section?
Etheryte
It is, but HN has the saving grace that dang is an angel and Y Combinator pays him to do the chores every day.
bluebarbet
That's important, and what gives it the edge over peers, but IMO it's more than that. It's mainly that this is a specialized forum (so its community already has something in common beyond the lowest common denominator of politics) and it's dedicated to highly technical subjects (so contributors here tend to be more literalist and, let's say, spectrum-tending, which really helps with text communication). That's how I explain it.
Cthulhu_
It is nowadays, not just because of spam (there's both hosted and 3rd party solutions for that) but non-spam but unwanted / vile comments. Internet anonymity has always brought out the worst in people.
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!
rchaud
As an erstwhile teenaged Geocities fanatic, all these "old web was good, let's go back to it" posts miss some key factors that block such a way back.
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.
listenfaster
I agree with you on rss 100%.
tiniuclx
I set up my personal website [0] quite a while ago - 2020 or so. I've been updating it a lot more regularly in the last few years and I've found it very rewarding. It's great to have my own place where I am in full control of everything, and I've also learned a lot about webdev which is not my core focus usually.
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.
r_c_a_d
"quite a while ago - 2020"
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/
tiniuclx
I hadn't even learned how to walk in 1999, let alone host a personal website!
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.
r_c_a_d
Yay! We have lots of Bionicles in the house still. My boys used to buy me a new one when I started a new job for my desk - when working in the office was a thing.
Not having your own website is an opportunity missed for techies especially, I think.
ChrisArchitect
More on the POSSE approach (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
fjallstrom
I found this (super short) episode inspiring, on the same topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5n6BYw5VU7cLipoRKE1COU (The Poetic Internet, with Kristoffer Tjalve)
I remember back in the summer of 1996 in Pakistan our household was one of the first few to have to internet.
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.