A lot of people talk about how things were better in the old days, perhaps when the Internet didn’t exist or was smaller.
First of all, we deserve nice things. Even though it seems everything goes online, you have to do your best to ignore it. In the case of wanting a smaller Internet, you aren’t looking hard enough.
Entry Points
How did I come across other peoples’ websites?
- Other sites
- Mastodon
- Forums
- Hacker News
- Reddit Perhaps you didn’t expect me to reference bigger sites, but that’s the truth. It’s inevitable that some will get visited more and link to other sites.
In terms of other people’s personal sites, they often link to other ones that they like to read. I have my own page for that. Additionally you might want to set up an RSS feed, that way people can get updated when you publish. If you’ve never used one, you’ll quickly see how many small sites have one.
Start Your Own Site
Before everything got funnelled into a handful of apps, it’s what people used to do. This isn’t a tutorial, but here are different ways in order of difficulty.
- Pay for managed for WordPress
- Deploy to GitHub Pages
- Run your own web server Additionally you’ll need to pay for a domain. You can get a .co.uk domain from Mythic Beasts for £7.20 per year.
You might argue that WordPress isn’t “simple” enough from a programming perspective, even though by today’s standards it is. One benefit is that it has the lowest barrier to entry whilst being quite flexible. If you want to go down this route, I suggest you look at creating your own themes/templates to make your site more personal.
I have never used GitHub Pages, though it is easy to get into whilst giving you control over what you use to create your site. This is cheaper than WordPress because you only need to pay for your domain. The disadvantage is that you are stuck with static pages, but it’s possible to use static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll to make your life much easier. As a rule of thumb, you’ll only need to go for a dynamic site if you are dealing with user input.
My site is run on my own server. This would give you the most freedom so you can use PHP (WordPress), static pages or even start your own email server. Realistically, if you’re ever going to do this, you don’t need to hear me talk about it.
What Do I Write About?
Anything. Perhaps it could be something at interests you or what you’ve been doing. Check out this site for ideas. If you’re really stuck, you could even just put links to where you exist on the rest of the Internet.
Will People Read My Site?
I don’t know. Most internet traffic will be robots which you can tell to go away with this in your robots.txt. Whether they follow it is up to them however.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Share your site with other spaces on the Internet and maybe people you know. If people don’t know about it, they won’t visit it. But don’t let this bother you much as you’ll still learn a lot about web development and computing, even if you only run a static site.
RSS Is Everything
For those who haven’t heard of it: it’s the closest thing to getting push notifications for websites.
If you start/run your own site, make sure to set up an RSS feed for your blog. That way others can save your site and not forget about it. I use Thunderbird as an RSS Reader.