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Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)
- cjslep 7y ago> The first step of this is to explore more ways to establish new and strengthen existing connections – and also to improve findability. We don’t have to reinvent everything from scratch but can build on so much that already exists. I use ActivityPub as both the broadcasting mechanism and the mechanism to obtain comments for my personal site. It also allows people to follow my account on my blog from the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). So far, not much engagement (mostly my fault for not posting too much). But a working proof of concept. It isn't easy to do though, and I skipped all the other tech to do the AP support first (webmentions, rss/atom).
- tsukurimashou 7y agoCould you explain a bit more about how you implemented it? Can you share your website to see how it actually looks like? I've read a lot recently about the Activity Pub protocol and I've been following Mastodon / Pleroma for a while but never really made the jump
- cjslep 7y agoSure, see: https://cjslep.com/c/blog/this-blog-is-federated https://cjslep.com/c/blog/this-blog-is-federated It's pretty bare bones and has had significant downtime due to Mastodon spamming "account Deleted" activities, which would crash my little server. I hope I have now fixed it.
- tudorw 7y agoThe author is right, one day, all these services will be gone, unless you control a domain name and self publish, you are risking a lot.
- sp332 7y agoI'm not convinced that owning a domain name is that reliable. Facebook is less likely to let their registration lapse in the next 30 years than I am.
- Jaruzel 7y agoFollowing on from this excellent article, would other HN users care to share the URLs of their personal webspaces? Mine is: http://www.jaruzel.com http://www.jaruzel.com (yes, I know it's not SSL'd!)
- jordiburgos 7y agoMy personal blog, not writing in a while, but some pages still get quite a lot of visits: https://jordiburgos.com https://jordiburgos.com
- sundarurfriend 7y agoHas the blog been hugged to death perhaps? I get a "The connection has timed out" error.
- jordiburgos 7y agoWorks on my machine :)
- juanuys 7y agohttps://juanuys.com https://juanuys.com But the really good stuff is in my pen-and-paper journals...
- kristerv 7y agoI'm over here: https://krister.ee/ https://krister.ee/. I like your grid though. Easy to scan.
- Jaruzel 7y agoCheers!
- ASlave2Gravity 7y agoSure! :D https://warpedandtorn.io/ https://warpedandtorn.io/ - Having my own little space to publish whatever I want is extremely liberating. EDIT: Would love to also set up a blog roll with other HNers. If anyone likes anything on my site link me yours! Would love to chat and share and link to each other's sites!
- banfeld 7y agoI love this article, and that people are leaving their own sites below - more food for my RSS reader! Here's mine: https://jamiesnotes.com https://jamiesnotes.com
- jborichevskiy 7y ago> Email status: 2 unread. Love this! Although the response rate of people online is extraordinarily high, it's nice to get an extra datapoint about whether you're buried in emails right now and to not expect a response right away.
- cousin_it 7y agoJust be careful to manage your expectations. This idea won't solve the central problem of the attention economy - low average attention per unit of content. Modern social networks are actually better at that, because they entice people to spend attention on lots of content. Getting hundreds of views on your YouTube video, Facebook status or Medium post is much easier than on your personal site. That's how the "new web" won creator mindshare. The "old web" will keep losing until it finds an answer to that.
- mbreese 7y agoIt's not just the aggregation aspect or the built in audience that the centralized platforms offer. It's the simplicity. It is very easy to "publish" your own content. Following a 90/9/1 rule [1], where most of the users are consumers, it becomes difficult for "average" people to contribute content when you've raised the bar so high that they need to have a personal site. That level of overhead will hinder many people. It's not just the technical aspect either -- just the problem of choosing a color scheme or layout is a roadblock to many people. When you can just type a post into a short input box or in a webform and just let Twitter and Facebook worry about the "publishing", that's a much lower bar to cross. And when you lower the cost of entry, you'll have significantly more participation. I think that's the main draw of the current centralized services -- the bar of entry is low enough that the proverbial mom or grandmother can now use Facebook (or whatever) to post their own content. Unfortunately, that leads to one of the downsides of the centralized services, which was your point. Now that 9% of people who want to contribute content and learn about how to do it (design their site, wire up the services, etc...) now don't have as big of a potential audience. Which I guess we have the same point, just from different angles (consumers vs producers). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- CaptArmchair 7y agoYou have to keep in mind that HTML, HTTP and URI's where never developed with the intention to cater to the needs of billions. They were build as robust tools to quickly share and connect research notes in academia. They survived thus far because their are build on top of a few solid first principles that boost that robustness. They promote interoperability, but that's about it. Their crude design has led to the fact that every iteration of the past 30 years is pretty much trying to solve the same problems: discoverability, interactivity, easy-of-use, scalability, security, performance and so on. We try to fix things without breaking the world. More to the point, HTML, HTTP or URI don't give you the tools to actually promote your content. They just enable you to put a node in a large network of hypertext. That's it. HTML is meant to structure content by adding cues / tags in such a way that machines can grok that content. But it doesn't tell you how to interpret the content. HTTP just allows you to connect a client to a server and exchange HTTP messages. It doesn't define what's in those messages. And a URI is simply a spec that defines an identifier, not what it defines exactly nor how things could or should be linked. It's only when the Web became this pile of hypertext, too large to index by hand, that the current denizens of the Web started to pop up. Google is ultimately nothing more then a fancy telephone book. And social media are at their core just a single big shared wall where everyone can tack on messages. Arguably, building a website is the least efficient way of reaching a large audience, simply because the core tools of the Web weren't inherently designed to do that. Hence why we've seen how SEO and marketing hackers are at odds to game search indexes and their algorithms. It used to be that their influence was limited to the space telephone book publishers reserved for advertising. Isn't it that then strange how SEO marketeers aren't effectively not doing things that different from what their forebearers did in the 1950's? The big power of the Web isn't the fact that your page can be found just by Google or shared via a social network. That's a reductionist form of looking at what you can accomplish. The true power is that you can connect to others without needing advertising companies or moloch telephone book publishers. See, the same crude robustness provided by those open standards allows you to create your own network of hypertext between you and many friends. The Web is not a single glob of content; it can be many globs of content that are interconnected and can transform as human relationships and interaction transforms. It's not a static thing that needs to be held down by incumbents merely because mom and pop don't know how to write HTML. You can perfectly have your own web presence and be part of a centralized service as well. Try looking at principles such as POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE) You can have your cake and eat it at the same time. That's totally possible. See, if Google and big tech try to slay URL's; they effectively disconnect themselves from the Web. They isolate themselves. And that's a bigger risk to themselves then it is to the survival of the Web. Because although the Web is huge, it's resilience is found in it's ability to adapt and evolve as provided by the core design principles that underpin the entire tech stack. Everything else is mainly sugar and sprinkles.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisweekly 7y agoAnyone else remember "web rings" from the 1990's?
- banfeld 7y agoYes. There are a few smaller webrings about, but blog discovery is a problem unsolved.
- chrisaldrich 7y agoHere's a list of several including an "IndieWeb Ring" that was started in the last two years that features personal websites: https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring
- weci2i 7y agoIt's funny that you mention this. I was just explaining to a young coworker how we basically had social networking in the 90's. My friends and I (even nontechnical kids) all maintained Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod pages. We'd load them up with free scripts for counters, guestbooks, and cheesy popup messages. Then we'd all link around to each others' pages and follow each other with web rings.
- runninganyways 7y agoI think I know why personal websites aren't popular anymore. It's the same reason retro video games aren't as fun as they were when they came out. What's missing is the context of the time when they were popular. They were new and had a high-tech aura about them. Nowadays making a website doesn't differentiate you in a good way unless you have a super creative way of coming up with the website and a lot of content to fill it with. Nowadays you have to take it to the next level. What's a skill that's beyond the reach of most people? This could be why PCB business cards are so appealing. Because it's a thing most people can't do and if you can do it it shows your technical prowess. I think that's my personal web pages were popular back then and why they won't ever be popular again.
- weci2i 7y agoYou are probably onto something with this train of thought. I had an Angelfire website when I was 17 in the 90's. All my friends were blown away by my terrible design and color choices because they weren't on the web. Putting something accessible by the entire world out there seemed like magic to them. The web in general felt much more magical then.
- rchaud 7y agoMy personal site is where I review music I like. Good opportunity to practice design ideas that wouldn't otherwise find its way into my work-related material. http://fuzzcrush.xyz http://fuzzcrush.xyz Yes, there's no SSL.
- s5l8900xrb 7y agoMy personal site is for the archival of early iOS stuff (iOS 1.x apps pre dating the AppStore and what not) as well as some forks and new software http://lexploit.com http://lexploit.com . Purposely 90s in style.
- dzink 7y agoJust restarted mine recently with new content brewing now. https://blog.dianazink.com https://blog.dianazink.com Old one was DMOZ listed so it points to my biggest project https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com
- skyfaller 7y agoIn the feed reader section of the article, he mentions an RSS reader, Feediary, which is already dead only months after he wrote about it: https://feediary.com/posts/2019-09-02-goodbye/ https://feediary.com/posts/2019-09-02-goodbye/ Since the demise of Google Reader, I've never found an RSS reader I'm entirely happy with. I hope someone does more to update the concept, perhaps with additional support for the Fediverse to fully use the features of projects like WriteFreely https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
- vlucas 7y agoGreat article. I have thought a lot about personal websites and the lack of any built-in "social" aspect. Comments, forums, guestbooks, webrings, topsites, etc. all used to be commonplace, and these have all but disappeared as social networks have risen. I am not sure that any of these ideas themselves will make a comeback, but a remix of them might fill some gaps that exist today, especially with discovery. My attempt at a social discovery network of sorts, for content websites: https://cruton.app https://cruton.app It's a Reddit-style presentation, but instead of votes, it ranks URLs purely on traffic and qualitative metrics. Add it to your site if you want to help me test it out and improve it :)
- pramit 7y agoTruho.com.
- coreymaass 7y agoMy web projects: https://gelform.com https://gelform.com My music reviews and podcast: https://BassTourist.com https://BassTourist.com
- luord 7y agoMy website is: https://luord.com https://luord.com Really need to write a new post, I just can't think of what about.
- creatornator 7y agoI have a personal website at https://matansilver.com https://matansilver.com At some point I'd like to spend some time building out a larger body of writing to post, maybe a gist-like snippet list.
- teekay 7y agoGreat article. Brings back many good memories. I blog about tango music, which probably won't be of any interest to this crowd. https://tomaskohl.com/tango https://tomaskohl.com/tango. Planning to start a more techy blog, and looking at static code generators. Too many of them! :)
- forgotmypw15 7y agohttp://shitmyself.com/ http://shitmyself.com/ no HTTPS compatible with every browser you can throw at it