[mamborambo]

Although the rise of walled gardens was the biggest headwind to more people maintaining their personal websites, I think there is also a lot of issues arising from the underlying technologies of website building relative to the neophytes.

Imagine what an aspiring content creator (writer, photographer, artist, musician etc) needs to master and navigate in order to get his own social network website up: domain names, ssl, html css javascript, image editing, comments, categories and tags, rss, pings, moderating, email, mail lists, analytics, pagerank, seo, search, translate, etc. Each with different backends, different logins, different degree of tech knowledge required.

As walled gardens like FB and Myspace grew in capabilities, why didn't the blog platforms and website builders grow their design to simplify the onboarding as well? This is probably the result of venture money sucking all the best engineering talents away from the open source and free platforms..

I remember distinctly, in early 2000 trying to help a friend to create his own web site to be a museum of his life's work of writing. After trying to teach him all the underlying web infrastructures and technologies, he came to the conclusion he should just hire a web consultant.

Walled gardens simplified the chores of posting online, and they do a very good job for millions of non-techies. Without this huge step, we would have lost even more creative output from the past 20 years.

[jdthedisciple]

> why didn't the blog platforms and website builders grow their design to simplify the onboarding as well?

Not sure I understood you correctly but isn't this exactly what e.g. WordPress did - and pretty darn well too?

[denton-scratch]

> email, mail lists, analytics, pagerank, seo, search, translate, etc.

I thought we were discussing personal sites. Why does a personal site need analytics?

I'm not sure what "pagerank" means, unless it's SEO specifically for Goo.

SEO in the sense of reasonable page design, comes for free with a builder like Wordpress. Other kinds of SEO are for scammers and the get-rich-quick brigade.

Search is cool; but translate, for a personal site? Is it too much to expect visitors that don't know your language, but want to use your site, to resort to an online translator? You could even link to it.