Been running it since 2005 (and posting mostly regularly.. about 1200+ posts now but the vast majority of that was me posting about tech news back when I had first started it).
It's a mix of tech, design, photography and generally whatever personally interests me at the time from fido2 security keys to NAS storage for my photos and so on. I recently wrote a bit about how I built it: https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this-website/
My blog is always a struggle sorting the esoteric docs of Hugo, but my website is plain vanilla HTML and is always refreshing to work on after a week of webpacked JavaScript:
Lordy - I've built so many over the years! Almost all I've learned about coding (since 1990s) has been through playing with personal sites. I'm currently rewriting my poetry site[1][2] from scratch with new tech, and will be documenting the process on my (resurrected) learning blog[3].
I also built some sites to 'advertise' my Javascript library[4] - but given that nobody in the world uses the library (or if they do, they're not telling me about it) I consider this, too, to be a personal site.
My other big project - building a whole constructed world with maps, languages, histories, etc[5][6][7] - is so 'out there' that I consider it to be "uber-personal" ... and yet this is the site which has led to many of my most important learning experiences (from building databases to designing alien fonts). It's also the site that got me into coding in the first place: if it hadn't been my massive desire to showcase my mad world to the dozen other people in the real world who might be interested in it, I would never have thought about becoming a professional web coder!
Only a few years old, not so much on there yet, but.. Some good things: List of movies/series watched since 2012 (which I consult all the time), huge quotes collection, fav books and writers, some of my maths art, some pages of (basic) maths I was learning, guide to bash, Miles Davis disc-gig-ography, Romance languages compared, etc..
https://paplauskas.lt/ no js, no static site generator, all html and css written by hand. Blogging like this is so refreshing after coming home from a mile-high stack of dependencies at work :). The only part I haven't solved yet is having comments under posts in the same lean way.
Sure! :D 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!
Sure. I have a place at https://heerdebeer.org. I use it to share my work in history, education, and software engineering. I do not update it often and there is not much traffic, but it has been a stable place for things I care about.
https://patrickkeane.me It's built with Wordpress and a standard theme, nothing fancy. I have to update more often.
I post about random projects and interests of mine, and linking to interesting Github projects. I'm currently building a Proliant Gen8 NAS with OpenMediaVault, and going down the home automation rabbit hole (see /r/homeassistant / Lovelace software) so I might post that on there.
I also flashed a Vu+ set top box with OpenVix[1] and hooked it up to a huge satellite dish, another project that I should share details of. I have a habit of gathering bookmarks in OneNote for future projects which I really should share.
Currently completely static and handwritten HTML (except the generated download indices) but I do intend to add some sort of publishing thing to it at some point.
I mostly started it while learning Python and job hunting and sadly have not got back to keeping it up. For me, it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with a worthwhile topic and good narrative.
Also, I started it when I had a less-than-fulfilling job and now that I have much more interesting work it’s tough to build the energy for side/personal projects worth writing about.
And I kind of want to rebuild it from scratch (of course). It’s a statically generated site with Pelican and while building it I have often found myself just wanting to be able to make better use of straight HTML over RST/Markdown.
Personal websites are neato. I can draw myself as a cute ghost girl and put whatever I want on my site in whatever structure I want (although it's mostly just articles/blog posts/technical documentation and occasionally art) and nobody can stop me.
Mine's https://apt-get.xyz/. Not much on there: an old-school blog (hosted with BBdiary[1]), and a tiddlywiki at https://knowledge.apt-get.xyz, which I try to use as a reference for everything complex I'm learning/exploring. The rest is hand-written HTML.
Started it years ago as a WordPress site, then Jekyll and now a Hugo generated blog.
I really want to start spending more time putting things in there, for me if anything, as a living repository of the things I do...
I do agree that one thing we seem to be losing is the "blogroll" concept, where people would link to blogs of friends, or recommended websites. We should start doing that again - I've got a task for my website now!
I recently started with a personal website [1]. I wanted to dive into static site generators and used Zola[2] in the end. At this time I only published a few blog articles, but at least I started somewhere.
As my personal knowledge base I love to use Joplin[3]. I wanted to write my blog post with Joplin, too! I wrote a small script to generate the blog articles from Joplin notes and wrote about this in my first blog post [4].
I also plan to have some kind of linkage site. The biggest problem is to revised my large bookmark collection and pick out the best ones. I probably should just begin with new cool stuff I stumble upon. Secondly, I would like to have some kind of feedback system (comments, activitypub, ...) but without any (or at least too much) server side code and without using some external provider.
Btw, the site is also available fully decentralized via dat. Yeahh.
Just getting into having a personal site. Wanted to try out a static site generator so I've been slowly poking at getting something going with Hugo. Hopefully over the next month or so I'll develop my own theme.
Over time I think I'll end up with an interesting mix of things on here.
https://sequoia.makes.software Mostly technical posts. Roll-your-own SSG, naturally[0]. If you type "resume" you see my resume :) Comments use https://getsimpleform.com/ and just send me an email, then I manually add the comment. Works Pretty Good!
I would happily implement web-mentions or whatever (I added rss feed when someone requested it) but I don't know exactly how they're different from comments. I have comments that link back to the comment-authors website, is that a webmention?
I use very similar tech stacks for https://loop-thesis.com and https://distilledjs.com. I should probably get around to setting up a Mastadon instance as well, but I'm not completely sure I want one yet.
----
[0]: I realize that some people would prefer full RSS feeds, but I just haven't had time to add one, and because the site has no tracking or JS requirements it's just not my highest priority right now.
I recently decided that it was high time to start publishing my essays, stories and other stuff related to life and work; mostly as a reminder to myself and maybe leave something useful for my children and others to read.
here is mine: https://reinkober-it.de
I started it as a kind of learning-focused project but then it grew into a small Docker Architecture with a small blog, API usage to show off my projects & top HackerNews stories.
Just 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.
I 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.
> 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).
Great 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
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 :)
My 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 . Purposely 90s in style.
In 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/
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/
My 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.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|6 years ago|reply
Mine is: http://www.jaruzel.com (yes, I know it's not SSL'd!)
[+] [-] PStamatiou|6 years ago|reply
Been running it since 2005 (and posting mostly regularly.. about 1200+ posts now but the vast majority of that was me posting about tech news back when I had first started it).
It's a mix of tech, design, photography and generally whatever personally interests me at the time from fido2 security keys to NAS storage for my photos and so on. I recently wrote a bit about how I built it: https://paulstamatiou.com/about-this-website/
[+] [-] vga805|6 years ago|reply
https://n0thingness.com
[+] [-] komali2|6 years ago|reply
http://www.calebjay.com
Topics: frontend, bootcamps, motorcycling, traveling
Incidentally, I'm investigating simple ways to display my favorite photography on my site, but I've not figured out yet a good UI or system for that.
[+] [-] rikroots|6 years ago|reply
I also built some sites to 'advertise' my Javascript library[4] - but given that nobody in the world uses the library (or if they do, they're not telling me about it) I consider this, too, to be a personal site.
My other big project - building a whole constructed world with maps, languages, histories, etc[5][6][7] - is so 'out there' that I consider it to be "uber-personal" ... and yet this is the site which has led to many of my most important learning experiences (from building databases to designing alien fonts). It's also the site that got me into coding in the first place: if it hadn't been my massive desire to showcase my mad world to the dozen other people in the real world who might be interested in it, I would never have thought about becoming a professional web coder!
[1] - current poetry site - http://rikweb.org.uk/rikverse2012/ [2] - new poetry site (very much under construction!) - http://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/ [3] - learning blog - https://blog.rikworks.co.uk/
[4] - Scrawl-canvas library homepage - http://scrawl.rikweb.org.uk/
[5] - Kalieda Encyclopaedia (main site) - http://rikweb.co.uk/kalieda/index.php [6] - (incompleted) Beta site for the Gevey language - http://gevey.rikweb.org.uk/ [7] - (incompleted) Beta site for the Ewlah Lands (maps!) - http://lands.rikweb.org.uk/
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|6 years ago|reply
HN readers will probably be most interested in https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing
edit: I also have a couple of projects to play with: https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#interactive
[+] [-] nathell|6 years ago|reply
Made with an ad-hoc static site generator: https://github.com/nathell/nhp
[+] [-] yesenadam|6 years ago|reply
Only a few years old, not so much on there yet, but.. Some good things: List of movies/series watched since 2012 (which I consult all the time), huge quotes collection, fav books and writers, some of my maths art, some pages of (basic) maths I was learning, guide to bash, Miles Davis disc-gig-ography, Romance languages compared, etc..
[+] [-] TadasPaplauskas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ASlave2Gravity|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] ht_th|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickk|6 years ago|reply
I post about random projects and interests of mine, and linking to interesting Github projects. I'm currently building a Proliant Gen8 NAS with OpenMediaVault, and going down the home automation rabbit hole (see /r/homeassistant / Lovelace software) so I might post that on there.
I also flashed a Vu+ set top box with OpenVix[1] and hooked it up to a huge satellite dish, another project that I should share details of. I have a habit of gathering bookmarks in OneNote for future projects which I really should share.
[1] http://www.openvix.co.uk/
[+] [-] darekkay|6 years ago|reply
Mostly dev stuff, but also some general tips&tricks and an "adventure" section. Built with hexo static site generator. RSS included ;)
[+] [-] sjmulder|6 years ago|reply
Currently completely static and handwritten HTML (except the generated download indices) but I do intend to add some sort of publishing thing to it at some point.
[+] [-] cdubzzz|6 years ago|reply
I mostly started it while learning Python and job hunting and sadly have not got back to keeping it up. For me, it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with a worthwhile topic and good narrative.
Also, I started it when I had a less-than-fulfilling job and now that I have much more interesting work it’s tough to build the energy for side/personal projects worth writing about.
And I kind of want to rebuild it from scratch (of course). It’s a statically generated site with Pelican and while building it I have often found myself just wanting to be able to make better use of straight HTML over RST/Markdown.
[+] [-] InvisibleUp|6 years ago|reply
Personal websites are neato. I can draw myself as a cute ghost girl and put whatever I want on my site in whatever structure I want (although it's mostly just articles/blog posts/technical documentation and occasionally art) and nobody can stop me.
Also shoutouts to https://neocities.org for being an excellent repository of personal websites, and the various sites under https://tildeverse.org/
[+] [-] 4fips|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apt-get|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/yumi-xx/BBDiary
[+] [-] aurbano|6 years ago|reply
Started it years ago as a WordPress site, then Jekyll and now a Hugo generated blog.
I really want to start spending more time putting things in there, for me if anything, as a living repository of the things I do...
I do agree that one thing we seem to be losing is the "blogroll" concept, where people would link to blogs of friends, or recommended websites. We should start doing that again - I've got a task for my website now!
[+] [-] jordiburgos|6 years ago|reply
https://jordiburgos.com
[+] [-] jfreax|6 years ago|reply
As my personal knowledge base I love to use Joplin[3]. I wanted to write my blog post with Joplin, too! I wrote a small script to generate the blog articles from Joplin notes and wrote about this in my first blog post [4].
I also plan to have some kind of linkage site. The biggest problem is to revised my large bookmark collection and pick out the best ones. I probably should just begin with new cool stuff I stumble upon. Secondly, I would like to have some kind of feedback system (comments, activitypub, ...) but without any (or at least too much) server side code and without using some external provider.
Btw, the site is also available fully decentralized via dat. Yeahh.
[1] https://blog.jdsoft.de
[2] https://www.getzola.org
[3] https://joplinapp.org
[4] https://blog.jdsoft.de/a-blog-a-blog/
[+] [-] benwerd|6 years ago|reply
I use Known, a platform I cofounded, which supports the Webmentions / IndieWeb ecosystem described in the article. https://github.com/idno/known
[+] [-] inerg|6 years ago|reply
Over time I think I'll end up with an interesting mix of things on here.
https://www.timmermans.dev/
[+] [-] jlelse|6 years ago|reply
Both are generated with Hugo (https://gohugo.io/).
[+] [-] SJSque|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sequoia|6 years ago|reply
I would happily implement web-mentions or whatever (I added rss feed when someone requested it) but I don't know exactly how they're different from comments. I have comments that link back to the comment-authors website, is that a webmention?
0: https://github.com/Sequoia/sequoia.github.com/blob/rewrite/s...
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
RSS: https://danshumway.com/rss.xml [0]
Video Content: https://peertube.danshumway.com
I use very similar tech stacks for https://loop-thesis.com and https://distilledjs.com. I should probably get around to setting up a Mastadon instance as well, but I'm not completely sure I want one yet.
----
[0]: I realize that some people would prefer full RSS feeds, but I just haven't had time to add one, and because the site has no tracking or JS requirements it's just not my highest priority right now.
[+] [-] iapsngh|6 years ago|reply
I recently decided that it was high time to start publishing my essays, stories and other stuff related to life and work; mostly as a reminder to myself and maybe leave something useful for my children and others to read.
[+] [-] jedimastert|6 years ago|reply
https://amtunlimited.github.io/2020/01/20/nothing-is-finishe...
[+] [-] CptCrunch|6 years ago|reply
here is mine: https://reinkober-it.de I started it as a kind of learning-focused project but then it grew into a small Docker Architecture with a small blog, API usage to show off my projects & top HackerNews stories.
[+] [-] skytreader|6 years ago|reply
(Bought this domain way back in college. One of these days, I might finally shell out the money to get a trendy <myrealname>.co just because.)
[+] [-] dsr_|6 years ago|reply
It's mostly at the intersection of technology and philosophy. There's an RSS feed.
If you don't like either
https://blog.randomstring.org/2018/09/21/why-computer-securi...
or
https://blog.randomstring.org/2015/11/23/a-musical-analogy/
then you probably won't like the rest, either.
[+] [-] cousin_it|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runninganyways|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] banfeld|6 years ago|reply
Here's mine: https://jamiesnotes.com
[+] [-] tudorw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjslep|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] chrisweekly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlucas|6 years ago|reply
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
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 :)
[+] [-] s5l8900xrb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skyfaller|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
http://fuzzcrush.xyz
Yes, there's no SSL.
[+] [-] teekay|6 years ago|reply
I blog about tango music, which probably won't be of any interest to this crowd. https://tomaskohl.com/tango.
Planning to start a more techy blog, and looking at static code generators. Too many of them! :)
[+] [-] dzink|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] creatornator|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coreymaass|6 years ago|reply
My music reviews and podcast: https://BassTourist.com
[+] [-] forgotmypw15|6 years ago|reply
no HTTPS
compatible with every browser you can throw at it
[+] [-] luord|6 years ago|reply
Really need to write a new post, I just can't think of what about.
[+] [-] pramit|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]