[sleightofmind]

"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!