7 ms·

I remember MySpace being described as "an easy personal website" back in high school. Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Pers

I remember MySpace being described as "an easy personal website" back in high school. Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts. About.me used to be great, but it didn't get maintained. I'm working on a project to make personal websites as easy to set up as a social profile. No designs to pick - just a photo and profile photo. Not static - you have a mailing list and the latest post is shown on the homepage. And, people can "follow" with their emails. Facebook used to be pitched as "the place everybody is", but that's no longer true - social networks are getting dis-aggregated. So, I expect personal sites to become a way for people to gain more control over their audiences, and to help move an audience from one platform to another (via a "link in bio" to their personal sites) If you're interested in trying out my project for your own site: https://postcard.page https://postcard.page (Will trade free access for feedback!)

areactnativedev 4y ago
Wondering if Notion might not put you out of business. I have the impression they make it super easy to publish a "simple" page (could have a database) and edit it. Has seen a friend us Notion for that but haven't tried myself.
- philip1209 4y ago
  I tried super.so and was disappointed
andreyk 4y ago
Looks cool, but don't things like WordPress already make this easy?
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Setting up a whole wordpress is actually quite hard for the average person. Not to mention they need to also first pay and get web hosting.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    Based on context, I'd assume GP was referring to Wordpress.com, which requires none of that...
    - philip1209 4y ago
      My goal is that Postcard can get your site published in 2-3 minutes with nice design. Wordpress isn't built for personal sites. Too many themes, too hard to set up, too much overhead. I think most people that want a personal site are not motivated to figure out the whole process of finding a template, designing the pages, configuring all the content sections, etc. Plus, Wordpress doesn't have an easy mailing list tool built-in.
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        WordPress is absolutely made for personal websites. Its origin is quite literally blogging. There's plenty of turnkey mailing list plugins for WordPress, from Jetpack to using SendGrid, or MailChimp, all of which have free plans.
Melatonic 4y ago
Totally willing to do feedback for free access - this is cool
- philip1209 4y ago
  Email me and I'll send a coupon code! mail at philipithomas.com
philip1209 4y ago
P.S. - my personal site (on Postcard) is https://www.philipithomas.com https://www.philipithomas.com
micromacrofoot 4y ago
A personal website can still be as simple as dumping a single HTML file into your hosting provider's folder. Despite everything being built up in more complex ways, that hasn't changed since the beginning of the internet. In fact the lack of web style has seen a little bit of a resurgence.
- philip1209 4y ago
  Yeah, true - but I think the opportunity is a really tight integration with a mailing list. I think personal sites need some dynamic content - such as posts and a mailing list. Otherwise, they just feel stale. That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far simpler, and built for people instead of marketing organizations.
  - EddieDante 4y ago
    Well, I'm going to keep on being outdated. I've got posts and a RSS feed. If you insist on a mailing list then I'm pleased to disappoint you.
    - hedora 4y ago
      What’s a decent static site generator for this sort of thing today? I’m envisioning a directory of .md’s or whatever, then I run make, and it invokes a thing that builds a tree of .html with an rss feed in it. Finally, my makefile does an “s3 sync”. The older and more boring, the better.
      - kixiQu 4y ago
        Jekyll is old and boring as hell so the plugin ecosystem rules. I picked up eleventy in order to be able to prototype stuff on Glitch.
      - philip1209 4y ago
        I built https://tinker.fyi https://tinker.fyi using Nuxt.js - their `nuxt-content` library is great for having a markdown-based CMS. (I'm also using this stack for managing Terms of Service on https://contraption.co https://contraption.co and that project is open: https://github.com/contraptionco/contraption.co https://github.com/contraptionco/contraption.co )
_9xrb 4y ago
I'd like to see a project like this which is self-hosted, where the process of buying a domain, acquiring hosting, etc. is made easy for non-technical users. The problem with sites like about.me is that eventually the maintainer gets acquired, gets bored, gets hit by a bus, etc. With a self-hosted site, it works as long as you keep paying Namecheap and AWS, for example. This arrangement also separates the core project owners from responsibility for whatever users slap on their page down the line. I imagine users would go to one site (or app) to get it all running, and that site would hook them up with hosting and a domain name behind the scenes, maybe get them set up with a static page through a WYSIWYG editor, then boom done. Maybe give users a standalone app with their hosting keys and credentials that lets them update the content on their site directly (again through WYSIWYG, like Adobe Dreamwaver but easier), without going back to the initial setup site. A platform or service that handholds users through initial setup and billing, and then steps away once they're up and running, seems to me like the right mix of centralized/devolved control and responsbility. I realize what I'm describing sounds a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure, easy-to-use package. I guess it depends on your choice of target audience.
- philip1209 4y ago
  Email sending is surprisingly hard to get right. That's where a lot of the value for a hosted product comes from. With Postcard - I've had to add various checks and protections to prevent bot abuse (and to manage sender reputation). It would be really hard to be reactive like that on a self-hosted product.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    Is it more or less the same problem as running a GNU Mailman listserv in 2022? That is to say, a fairly hard problem of staying on top of security patches, avoiding getting marked as spam, and avoiding getting put on the big email provider's badlists. In theory, the problem seems simple: replace a manually-managed BCC list with an alias to said list, so it's less hassle for the user/sender. Maybe the answer is an email client plug-in that just autofills BCC to-addresses? Assumption would be the user's sending this email from a known provider like GMail or Fastmail. I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe you already do this. Edit: I'm also assuming email is sent one-way to whoever signs up, maybe with a link to the dynamic chat server/app/platform of the moment. Slightly different from a GNU Mailman list, which enables back-and-forth conversation.
zozbot234 4y ago
> Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts. There's nothing stopping personal sites from interacting with Fediverse standards. Then posting to your site is just a matter of inputing it as your home "server" in your preferred Fediverse app.
- jerojero 4y ago
  I would say that requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. More than what the average person would do anyway.
deepspace 4y ago
Unfortunately, the site crashed for me after uploading a background photo, and my test site is now permanently inaccessible.
- philip1209 4y ago
  Oh no, sorry! I see some image resizing errors in the logs. I'll get on it!
anonymous_sorry 4y ago
For me, what social media has over a personal website is a common identity system and access control. I would like to host my occasional posts and photos on my own site. But I don't want to post everything publically. But requiring people to sign up to my personal website is probably unreasonable. And requiring a login implies a DB of some kind, which for me transforms it from fun into work. I'm also not going to get excited about anything that isn't self-hosted. Sooner or later every cool startup either fails or becomes successful enough that their incentives no longer align with my interests.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  A compromise solution is publishing the post to your website, without having links to it from the public side, and sharing the URL only with your audience.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    To be frank I don't trust my entire audience with a secret link. Someone will leak it and crawlers will find it. A link to a photo or two is fine but if they can then crawl everything it is too risky for the non-technical people in my life.
    - zhte415 4y ago
      Not even someone leaking it. Email provider bots, chat bots, etc, will check it, and it might even end up in Bing just from there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892299
- sznio 4y ago
  OAuth? You'll still need a DB, but at least no signups.
- pmontra 4y ago
  > requiring a login implies a DB of some kind If your audience could accept the basic look of it, basic auth + https will work. You can automate the creation of a new entry in the passwords file and the restart of the web server.
gen220 4y ago
Hi Philip! I love the idea. I've thought about working on some similar project in the past, too. Just a feature suggestion, can you please make it easy for people to setup RSS feeds? Email-to-RSS solutions exist for technical people, but first party platform support for RSS will determine whether a significant minority of the nontechnical-but-literate internet (i.e. people who mostly consume and occasionally produce text) will adopt your service as a consumer. Wordpress, for example, generates RSS feeds by default at a predictable url. Same with blogspot, hugo, ghost, and even substack.
- philip1209 4y ago
  Hell yeah! I'll work on that this weekend :-)
nyjah 4y ago
I love that you used the standard tailwind stuff. I was doing ios apps for the last 5 years coming from web dev and recently started a rails project and made the same decision. I haven't pulled the trigger on the marketing pack or any of the packages, but the hero you chose is the one I am modeling after. Did you purchase the just the marketing pack or the whole shebang? Just out of curiosity. Looks great. Best of luck!
sleightofmind 4y ago
"Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts." (italics are mine) Huh? My definition of a personal website differs mightily from yours. Today, neocities.org and a day spent learning how to write simple HTML suffices. Fact is, I'm getting ready to do this once again myself. And I can email my friends (you know -- real friends) with a link. And I've found Google to be quite good at quickly adding my site to their databases. I can always find my sites using sensible search terms in Google. A personal website should not look like a corporate website, or like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter (well, unless that's your obsession). I find that a little HTML, the tiniest bit of CSS -- say 15-lines or less, some images/diagrams, and most importantly, something honest and interesting to say, is about all that's required. The use of Pandoc can make writing HTML almost trivial, but then writing plain HTML is almost trivial anyway, even with Notepad. A personal website is not a place to track visitors, or to manipulate them with "Please Subscribe" membership assaults upon them. It's personal, it's right there in the name. By personal, I don't mean it's where you spill your guts about yourself (although, if you want, you can). It can even be a subtle ad, emphasis on subtle, for your work. Will the real John D. Cook, please stand up? But why, in the name of all that's precious, does it have to be complicated? That's a rhetorical question, whose answer is, obviously, "It doesn't." And about this dis-aggregated business, this "gain more control over their audiences..." stuff, that doesn't sound so personal to me. I suspect many folks would gladly visit stale-looking sites that don't torment them with drop-down (and over) videos, and membership pleas 5-seconds after they begin reading the content they really came for. And on many sites, the absence of a comment section would be a blessing indeed -- the vitriol of the internet knows no bounds, and just being exposed to that stuff can sometimes send your mind down Negative Nellie Lane. So to any non-technical readers who would like to create a simple site to say something they've been wanting to say to no one, someone, or everyone, I say give Neocities, or something similar a try. Wait a week, search Google for your site. Feel special. It's fun!
bergenty 4y ago
I don’t know what you’re talking about. You can go to squarespace and set up a site in 15 mins. I know because I did it last month for my business.
samstave 4y ago
I'd like this same model for resumes. Like there is just a single place for RSAAU resume service as a utility.
- philip1209 4y ago
  I like this idea! I had a "Bootstrap Resume" project get popular back in like 2013. Maybe I should revive that :-)
  - samstave 4y ago
    TOTALLY revive that. Linkedin sucks as a resume.

areactnativedev 4y ago

Wondering if Notion might not put you out of business. I have the impression they make it super easy to publish a "simple" page (could have a database) and edit it. Has seen a friend us Notion for that but haven't tried myself.

philip1209 4y ago
I tried super.so and was disappointed

andreyk 4y ago

Looks cool, but don't things like WordPress already make this easy?

Melatonic 4y ago
Setting up a whole wordpress is actually quite hard for the average person. Not to mention they need to also first pay and get web hosting.
- happyopossum 4y ago
  Based on context, I'd assume GP was referring to Wordpress.com, which requires none of that...
  - philip1209 4y ago
    My goal is that Postcard can get your site published in 2-3 minutes with nice design. Wordpress isn't built for personal sites. Too many themes, too hard to set up, too much overhead. I think most people that want a personal site are not motivated to figure out the whole process of finding a template, designing the pages, configuring all the content sections, etc. Plus, Wordpress doesn't have an easy mailing list tool built-in.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      WordPress is absolutely made for personal websites. Its origin is quite literally blogging. There's plenty of turnkey mailing list plugins for WordPress, from Jetpack to using SendGrid, or MailChimp, all of which have free plans.

Melatonic 4y ago

Totally willing to do feedback for free access - this is cool

philip1209 4y ago
Email me and I'll send a coupon code! mail at philipithomas.com

philip1209 4y ago

P.S. - my personal site (on Postcard) is https://www.philipithomas.com https://www.philipithomas.com

micromacrofoot 4y ago

A personal website can still be as simple as dumping a single HTML file into your hosting provider's folder. Despite everything being built up in more complex ways, that hasn't changed since the beginning of the internet. In fact the lack of web style has seen a little bit of a resurgence.

philip1209 4y ago
Yeah, true - but I think the opportunity is a really tight integration with a mailing list. I think personal sites need some dynamic content - such as posts and a mailing list. Otherwise, they just feel stale. That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far simpler, and built for people instead of marketing organizations.
- EddieDante 4y ago
  Well, I'm going to keep on being outdated. I've got posts and a RSS feed. If you insist on a mailing list then I'm pleased to disappoint you.
  - hedora 4y ago
    What’s a decent static site generator for this sort of thing today? I’m envisioning a directory of .md’s or whatever, then I run make, and it invokes a thing that builds a tree of .html with an rss feed in it. Finally, my makefile does an “s3 sync”. The older and more boring, the better.
    - kixiQu 4y ago
      Jekyll is old and boring as hell so the plugin ecosystem rules. I picked up eleventy in order to be able to prototype stuff on Glitch.
    - philip1209 4y ago
      I built https://tinker.fyi https://tinker.fyi using Nuxt.js - their `nuxt-content` library is great for having a markdown-based CMS. (I'm also using this stack for managing Terms of Service on https://contraption.co https://contraption.co and that project is open: https://github.com/contraptionco/contraption.co https://github.com/contraptionco/contraption.co )

_9xrb 4y ago

I'd like to see a project like this which is self-hosted, where the process of buying a domain, acquiring hosting, etc. is made easy for non-technical users. The problem with sites like about.me is that eventually the maintainer gets acquired, gets bored, gets hit by a bus, etc. With a self-hosted site, it works as long as you keep paying Namecheap and AWS, for example. This arrangement also separates the core project owners from responsibility for whatever users slap on their page down the line. I imagine users would go to one site (or app) to get it all running, and that site would hook them up with hosting and a domain name behind the scenes, maybe get them set up with a static page through a WYSIWYG editor, then boom done. Maybe give users a standalone app with their hosting keys and credentials that lets them update the content on their site directly (again through WYSIWYG, like Adobe Dreamwaver but easier), without going back to the initial setup site. A platform or service that handholds users through initial setup and billing, and then steps away once they're up and running, seems to me like the right mix of centralized/devolved control and responsbility. I realize what I'm describing sounds a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure, easy-to-use package. I guess it depends on your choice of target audience.

philip1209 4y ago
Email sending is surprisingly hard to get right. That's where a lot of the value for a hosted product comes from. With Postcard - I've had to add various checks and protections to prevent bot abuse (and to manage sender reputation). It would be really hard to be reactive like that on a self-hosted product.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  Is it more or less the same problem as running a GNU Mailman listserv in 2022? That is to say, a fairly hard problem of staying on top of security patches, avoiding getting marked as spam, and avoiding getting put on the big email provider's badlists. In theory, the problem seems simple: replace a manually-managed BCC list with an alias to said list, so it's less hassle for the user/sender. Maybe the answer is an email client plug-in that just autofills BCC to-addresses? Assumption would be the user's sending this email from a known provider like GMail or Fastmail. I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe you already do this. Edit: I'm also assuming email is sent one-way to whoever signs up, maybe with a link to the dynamic chat server/app/platform of the moment. Slightly different from a GNU Mailman list, which enables back-and-forth conversation.

zozbot234 4y ago

> Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts. There's nothing stopping personal sites from interacting with Fediverse standards. Then posting to your site is just a matter of inputing it as your home "server" in your preferred Fediverse app.

jerojero 4y ago
I would say that requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. More than what the average person would do anyway.

deepspace 4y ago

Unfortunately, the site crashed for me after uploading a background photo, and my test site is now permanently inaccessible.

philip1209 4y ago
Oh no, sorry! I see some image resizing errors in the logs. I'll get on it!

anonymous_sorry 4y ago

For me, what social media has over a personal website is a common identity system and access control. I would like to host my occasional posts and photos on my own site. But I don't want to post everything publically. But requiring people to sign up to my personal website is probably unreasonable. And requiring a login implies a DB of some kind, which for me transforms it from fun into work. I'm also not going to get excited about anything that isn't self-hosted. Sooner or later every cool startup either fails or becomes successful enough that their incentives no longer align with my interests.

tomjakubowski 4y ago
A compromise solution is publishing the post to your website, without having links to it from the public side, and sharing the URL only with your audience.
- kevincox 4y ago
  To be frank I don't trust my entire audience with a secret link. Someone will leak it and crawlers will find it. A link to a photo or two is fine but if they can then crawl everything it is too risky for the non-technical people in my life.
  - zhte415 4y ago
    Not even someone leaking it. Email provider bots, chat bots, etc, will check it, and it might even end up in Bing just from there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892299
sznio 4y ago
OAuth? You'll still need a DB, but at least no signups.
pmontra 4y ago
> requiring a login implies a DB of some kind If your audience could accept the basic look of it, basic auth + https will work. You can automate the creation of a new entry in the passwords file and the restart of the web server.

gen220 4y ago

Hi Philip! I love the idea. I've thought about working on some similar project in the past, too. Just a feature suggestion, can you please make it easy for people to setup RSS feeds? Email-to-RSS solutions exist for technical people, but first party platform support for RSS will determine whether a significant minority of the nontechnical-but-literate internet (i.e. people who mostly consume and occasionally produce text) will adopt your service as a consumer. Wordpress, for example, generates RSS feeds by default at a predictable url. Same with blogspot, hugo, ghost, and even substack.

philip1209 4y ago
Hell yeah! I'll work on that this weekend :-)

nyjah 4y ago

I love that you used the standard tailwind stuff. I was doing ios apps for the last 5 years coming from web dev and recently started a rails project and made the same decision. I haven't pulled the trigger on the marketing pack or any of the packages, but the hero you chose is the one I am modeling after. Did you purchase the just the marketing pack or the whole shebang? Just out of curiosity. Looks great. Best of luck!

sleightofmind 4y ago

"Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts." (italics are mine) Huh? My definition of a personal website differs mightily from yours. Today, neocities.org and a day spent learning how to write simple HTML suffices. Fact is, I'm getting ready to do this once again myself. And I can email my friends (you know -- real friends) with a link. And I've found Google to be quite good at quickly adding my site to their databases. I can always find my sites using sensible search terms in Google. A personal website should not look like a corporate website, or like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter (well, unless that's your obsession). I find that a little HTML, the tiniest bit of CSS -- say 15-lines or less, some images/diagrams, and most importantly, something honest and interesting to say, is about all that's required. The use of Pandoc can make writing HTML almost trivial, but then writing plain HTML is almost trivial anyway, even with Notepad. A personal website is not a place to track visitors, or to manipulate them with "Please Subscribe" membership assaults upon them. It's personal, it's right there in the name. By personal, I don't mean it's where you spill your guts about yourself (although, if you want, you can). It can even be a subtle ad, emphasis on subtle, for your work. Will the real John D. Cook, please stand up? But why, in the name of all that's precious, does it have to be complicated? That's a rhetorical question, whose answer is, obviously, "It doesn't." And about this dis-aggregated business, this "gain more control over their audiences..." stuff, that doesn't sound so personal to me. I suspect many folks would gladly visit stale-looking sites that don't torment them with drop-down (and over) videos, and membership pleas 5-seconds after they begin reading the content they really came for. And on many sites, the absence of a comment section would be a blessing indeed -- the vitriol of the internet knows no bounds, and just being exposed to that stuff can sometimes send your mind down Negative Nellie Lane. So to any non-technical readers who would like to create a simple site to say something they've been wanting to say to no one, someone, or everyone, I say give Neocities, or something similar a try. Wait a week, search Google for your site. Feel special. It's fun!

bergenty 4y ago

I don’t know what you’re talking about. You can go to squarespace and set up a site in 15 mins. I know because I did it last month for my business.

samstave 4y ago

I'd like this same model for resumes. Like there is just a single place for RSAAU resume service as a utility.

philip1209 4y ago
I like this idea! I had a "Bootstrap Resume" project get popular back in like 2013. Maybe I should revive that :-)
- samstave 4y ago
  TOTALLY revive that. Linkedin sucks as a resume.