9 ms·

Let's make the web personal again

263 points by abreckle 4y ago

deafpolygon 4y ago
Except, no one wants to get doxxed.
beseku 4y ago
Is this something to do with Brian Lovin? I see the design of his personal site is a heavy influence, but didn't know it was open sourced? https://brianlovin.com/writing https://brianlovin.com/writing
- thisisnotanexit 4y ago
  It is open sourced here: https://github.com/brianlovin/briOS https://github.com/brianlovin/briOS
  - philipwhiuk 4y ago
    As MIT, not as "tell people it's yours": https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b052dcd18e2f802c1fec https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      And the condition under which one is allowed to do the things the MIT license allows one to do: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. No more steps!
- wongmjane 4y ago
  The source code is really similar Not seeing Brian Lovin’s name in the LICENSE file in Nym either...
  - lyptt 4y ago
    Looks like they've claimed Brian Lovin's work as their own, judging by this commit: https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b052dcd18e2f802c1fec https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - CaptArmchair 4y ago
      Yup. 10 commits, first commit was just 4 days ago. Same with their public website & docs. On Github, it's all barely 4 days old. Brian Lovin has released his work under the MIT license. AFAIK I believe this leaves it open to others to take the code and just run with it. Even so, looking at their value proposition, it's just a landing page that leads to https://nymhq.com/join https://nymhq.com/join where you can subscribe to a "waiting list" to join a server. They claim "Nym is currently in private beta with limited servers, but is accepting waitlist requests now." The "showcase" on the front page are just content fodder (AI? Web 2/3/5?) with quick, unstyled instances of their blogging software. The rest of that landing page seems to contain a lot of fluff as well. Frankly, I'm extremely apprehensive about supporting this.
  - trampish 4y ago
    Good to see this fixed quickly: https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/a3530463ee323b8ba49296009c49d58be19b6f0c https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/a3530463ee323b8ba492960...
    - wongmjane 4y ago
      After being caught, they called erasing Brian Lovin’s credit from the LICENSE file as “A huge oversight on our part” https://twitter.com/nym_hq/status/1592176933445701633 https://twitter.com/nym_hq/status/1592176933445701633
      - NickBusey 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
julianlam 4y ago
The HN zeitgeist (at least as of 2021) was to use a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll. Why would we want to use Nym — speaking as someone who doesn't use either, that is. When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses basically no resources. [1] https://devnull.land/github-gist-blog https://devnull.land/github-gist-blog
- devonallie 4y ago
  I write all my posts in Obsidian and export them to Hugo and it’s fantastic!
  - philipwhiuk 4y ago
    Honestly given HackerNews I was wondering if that was the actual rock at first.
- zote 4y ago
  Wouldn't adding Frontmatter to your markdown be a possible alternative to multiple files per gist to store metadata
  - julianlam 4y ago
    Hey, thanks for reading! That is possibly a solution I could take. At the time I was focused mainly on getting something shipped asap. It's been working well so far, although I did run into that issue of having more than 30 posts, so the oldest ones have already fallen off. Oops!
  - jayfae 4y ago
    Replied to the wrong message - but I did something similar here at https://www.jaynicolsmith.com/ https://www.jaynicolsmith.com/ (its still messy) - followed a tutorial somewhere and it processes my obsidian.md vault, make a note - push to git - tada - you can steal anything i have used for this from here https://github.com/Jayziv/summer-project https://github.com/Jayziv/summer-project
nunez 4y ago
If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace. My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this. Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
- Affric 4y ago
  Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is. 99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.
  - nunez 4y ago
    thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at moving Windows licenses. alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw significant resources at making phones and tablets the best they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too many times before)
    - wintermutestwin 4y ago
      > The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.
5amdotis 4y ago
You should add a working rss feed link here: `<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS feed" href="undefined/writing/rss">`
lazyfanatic 4y ago
Anyone remember webrings? Technology is so circular, old becomes new, over and over again. "Join our network!" at the end reminded me of them.
- ramses0 4y ago
  Aside: it would be nice to have geographically local "web-rings". There was a sewing consortium place nearby that I randomly drove by, and also a local quilting specialty shop that I saw, why aren't they all connected to each other in a "makerspace" webring, or "craft" or "art" ring with like waypost signs: "next cool art store 3.5mi thattaway =>" Same with craft brewing, or scratch bakeries, etc. Technically it might be "advertising your competition", but in a different light, it's trying to expand the amount of time and $$$ that the target customer group is spending in _any_ of the specialty / niche areas.
nickthegreek 4y ago
Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  If all you need is a static website, you can do it for under $10/year if you use AWS S3. Alternatively, Cloudflare pages is free.
  - croisillon 4y ago
    All your comments seem to be flagged by default, please reach an admin to clear that up
    - terminal_d 4y ago
      Thanks for the heads up, I contacted them via email. Turns out my account was flagged automatically and the ban's been lifted now.
      - croisillon 4y ago
        nice
- mateomorris 4y ago
  primo.so (FOSS)
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Review hosting providers on the folloiwing site: https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/ https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/ I use digital ocean, but their cost actualy rose a tad bit over the last year, and i have heard that hetzner has better pricing, though i have not yet used them. Again, just take a look at the above site, and can search for a low cost hosting provider. Others leverage github pages, etc...for free, but that seems antithetical to this greater topic of self-host your own. Good luck!
javajosh 4y ago
Great idea! But the problem, now, is on the client side. Readers need RSS. This lets authors publish at their own pace (which we can assume is relatively slowly) and doesn't burden the user with checking for new content manually. Of course, Twitter is a de facto RSS feed for some, and several other services (HN included) serve that role to some extent. But for the personal web, for those readers (and writers) of the web, you need RSS. The other problem is that a lot of writing is just not very good. Perhaps contraversially, I think that too is a tool problem: I've noticed that good authors take more time with their posts, get more feedback from more people, and even go to the trouble of thanking them in the post - which for very popular authors, like pg for example, is quite effective motivation and reward. But most authoring tools don't particularly encourage this behavior, preferring instead to give the author the least resistance possible to publishing. So, with either the return of Google Reader or equivalent, or the addition of a great RSS reader in Chrome, plus authoring tools that promote collaboration and revision, the personal web can flourish. Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.
- aikendrum 4y ago
  One of two things will happen. Either someone will build a huge business on top of a really great RSS reader, gradually adding features to feeds that customise to compete with substack / twitter etc; until the point where regular old feeds don't work as well, or at all in free readers. This is the IRC to Slack pipeline. Or, RSS will continue as an important technology, but one that's sidestepped in favour of social networks. I miss the old web, blogging, deep knowledge and intellectually diverse voices spread and hosted widely. But it stands in contrast to the centralising, oligopolistic tendencies of capitalism, and arguably high technology itself.
- asdff 4y ago
  >Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs. Or you can use existing blogware and rss. Plenty of people do use rss still today. Plenty of small and major media websites still offer it. Every few years there's a hn thread something akin to "ask hn: does anyone use rss still" at which point its the most engaged thread on the front page, with nearly all replies either saying that "yes I use it every day," or even "I got to this very thread from an rss feed." Honestly, if you are a blogger and want to select a readership base that has certain characteristics you are interested in (maybe it overlaps with your stereotypical hn user: techie or in the technology industry with more money than the median worker), you should offer an rss feed to capture these readers who might not even bother with platforms like twitter at all.
poszlem 4y ago
It's not going to be an original take if I say that I absolutely adored the early internet with the personal websites everywhere. Comparing it with the internet of today it makes me think of the difference between a high street in a small city, full of different shops and cafes vs. a shopping mall, where everything looks the same, is loud, smelly, and obnoxious. (Of course the early internet had a lot of loud, smell, and obnoxious places, but those were much easier to avoid). I also like the idea of people hosting their own sites. It was IMO much easier to talk about the free speech if you were hosting your own website and didn't have a "connection broker" (Twitter, Facebook) between you and your readers. The whole argument of "it's a private bussines, therefore it can just kick you out" goes out the window (unless you want to go and moles the ISP, but it's easier to argue that they are just an utility provider).
s3000 4y ago
> Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Are there plans for ActivityPub integration?
falcolas 4y ago
Dear Nym, check your layout on narrow screens. It's about 50% whitespace, thanks to the two un-dismissable blank columns on the left. https://imgur.com/a/0ilhUAw https://imgur.com/a/0ilhUAw
DarthNebo 4y ago
Dunno if all this banning & suppression of folks by private entities & governments is the push towards RSS again &/or some melding with IPFS
surprisetalk 4y ago
Personal websites are useful tools for organizing and re-organizing your mind. For me, a few simple practices have been life-changing: 1. Keeping a public list of soon/current/recent projects forces me to keep priorities straight over long stretches of time. 2. Maintaining a monthly newsletter organizes my life into personal "sprints". It also provides a tiny community of like-minded people. 3. Essays supercharge reflections on deep questions. If you have any big ideas or strong opinions, public writing is incredible distillation. 4. Writing for fun is fun! It's a productive craft well-suited to curious/obsessive minds (much like programming). --- https://taylor.town https://taylor.town
distcs 4y ago
Personal websites still do live. Here on HN too I have seen blog posts from independent websites/blogs run by individuals. What has changed though is the rapid rise of content platforms like Twitter, Medium, Substack and the likes where the sheer number of posts overwhelm the number of posts individual website owners can produce. But still the independent websites continue to run and stay alive. Some of them have quality content too and appear on HN many times. Is there a community/forum/channel of these independent website owners somewhere? Would love to hang out there.
donatj 4y ago
Bring back webrings? They were a great easy way to stumble on personal sites.
- KIFulgore 4y ago
  Man, I miss webrings. I could rabbit-hole down a group of sites about a particular interest for hours.
_jcrossley 4y ago
Yes please. With the “creator culture” from TikTok etc, I think if personal sites could be made _that_ easy and fun, they’d come back in fashion. Personally I’m ready for MySpace 2.0
dzuc 4y ago
The whole beauty of personal websites is their individuality. This completely misses the point.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
The showcase is 3 blogs from the same guy all with limited content? Okay.. so someone copied Brian Lovin's blog platform and is proud of themselves.
DustinBrett 4y ago
Totally agree as someone who has been making personal sites since I was a kid in '98. My latest iteration has been nearly 2 years in the making now. I had a WordPress blog for many years but finally decided it was time as a software developer to have a site that was custom. The core idea of the site is as if you've RDP'd into my Windows 10 machine and can see all my files and apps. Everything runs client side which was also something important to me. If interested please check it out, I nickname it daedalOS and it's also open source. https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/
agambrahma 4y ago
IMO making "a new Wordpress" doesn't feel like a great alternative -- Wordpress is pretty good as it is, and you have the option of self-hosting fairly painlessly if you want to. The fun of late-90s website-making is real though, but I don't see a turn towards that for the vast majority of people. One nice corner of optimism is projects like Glitch [1], which give just enough space to explore, go wild, and quickly host what you make. [1]: https://glitch.com https://glitch.com
lkrubner 4y ago
The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed to bring a libel suit against Twitter because of Section 230, nor would it be fruitful for her to file thousands (or even millions) of suits against the anonymous people who post that particular rumor. And so, for all practical purposes, the normal laws regarding libel have been suspended. And yet people still need some way to defend their reputations against lies. Do you want people to set up personal websites? The answer is obvious: repeal Section 230. Once Section 230 is gone, sites such as Twitter and Facebook will simply cease to exist. They will either shut down on their own, or they will be sued into oblivion. Everyone would be forced to set up their own website, and then take full legal responsibility for what is posted to that website. Once Section 230 is gone, then the normal rules of libel come back into force, as they existed for several centuries. Some extremists might regard this as censorship, but for several centuries the normal laws of libel were not regarded as censorship. A civil society can only prevail where people are required to take full legal responsibility for the things they say in public spaces. At the current moment, our laws regarding libel are made almost useless because the publisher of the lies are protected by Section 230, and going after each anonymous individual, when thousands or even millions of people are repeating the lie, is too burdensome for even wealthy individuals to pursue the cases. When wealthy people ask their lawyers "Can I sue?" the lawyers remind them of the Streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect I do not know what will happen in the future, but I am certain the current set of arrangements cannot survive. People must have some way of defending their reputations, and the traditional way of doing so has been through our laws regarding libel and slander. To my mind, the most obvious way forward is to repeal Section 230. Large sites such as Twitter and Facebook would likely vanish, and people would then be forced to set up personal websites, and they would be responsible for everything said on those websites. Like newspaper publishers, they could publish many writers, if they wanted to, but they would face the normal legal burdens of libel law, just like every newspaper.
- bovermyer 4y ago
codepoet80 4y ago
Slightly OT: what framework is in use for that website? The responsive approach looks a lot like a modern version of Enyo (https://sdk.webosarchive.org/enyo2sampler/ https://sdk.webosarchive.org/enyo2sampler/)
ripsawridge 4y ago
I've had my site (https://www.mountainwerks.org https://www.mountainwerks.org) going since 1998, and for sure, I am myself the primary user. But over time, my gosh, there is a lot of content. It started as a log of trips to the mountains. I found religion through trying to pay homage to nature by remembering each "piece" of it. Because an attitude of thankfulness gradually became nature (thanks to going out so danged much). I wouldn't know any other way to live. Old ideas are often gold.
superultra 4y ago
I think the flaw in this logic is that somehow it's technically hard to start a personal blog, so they invent a technical solution (a better platform). But there are plenty of great platforms that are easy to use, Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress.com, etc. The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social. My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of people or more who were or would be vested in a so-called "personal web" as there were 10 or 20 years ago. But I think that we've all allowed ourselves to be trained that the levels of engagement and web visitors that we would have been happy with 10-20 years ago just doesn't match up to what social platforms can provide, so most people that would have a personal blog just aren't. I know my personal blog from 20 years ago, which I posted to daily, feels very small and quaint. I also know that I would be disappointed with "engagement." A more personal web doesn't really need better platforms or tech, it needs a mindset reset.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  To add to this, centralization has been such a big part of the past 20 years with Social Media that it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It has and continues to be an "and" proposition -> social media presence + "personal"/brand/corporate/? website must go hand in hand. The people who get the flywheel right get an outsized piece of typical mind share and opportunity.
- asdff 4y ago
  I think what makes it difficult is that there's a sense that self hosting (or coding in general) is not going to click with you if you aren't already a techie. People just shut down, but its not their fault, that's just what marketing has told them for 25 years. Marketing comes in lying, saying its hard to do these things, that you need to pay someone to hold your hand and keep you safe, and doing otherwise means you are a fool, since they can point to their massive populations of sheep that already believed their lie as some sort of justification for why they are right. In reality, its easy to code. Its easy to set up self hosting. Its easy to write your own html. It probably takes as long for you to get up to speed with the basics of these things as it does for you to learn some gui tool that you have to pay for somehow to do a very limited set of these things. I think of all my accountant friends, absolute wizards in excel which is no easy feat, who would be able to make money hand over fist if they just took even less time to learn the basics of programming and data science than it did to get so proficient at excel. Unfortunately the big lie of technology has hit them too, and they have convinced themselves that they are somehow mentally unable to understand this stuff, or that they should have gone to school for it and now have no hope of ever learning it, even though their expertise in excel proves they are perfectly capable of learning this sort of stuff if they gave it a chance. It's not harder, its actually easy, 7 year olds can wrap their head around computer code, so that means you can too with just a little bit of patience. Unfortunately patience is also in short supply these days thanks to marketing setting expectations that all good things should be instant gratification or they aren't good at all.
bobajeff 4y ago
Could someone tell me what is meant by "just-in-time WebSockets loading"? Google has failed me.
steve_john 4y ago
misingnoglic 4y ago
Wow, thanks for listing me as a personal website that you love! It'll give me some motivation to write new blog posts. For anyone curious it's the aryaboudaie.com one
davesque 4y ago
I always love having an excuse to repost this: https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/ This is my idea of the personal web.
13415 4y ago
It's a standard to have a personal website, at least among my colleagues and generally among people I find interesting.
towawy 4y ago
How do you find a decent domain on a trusted TLD in the year 2022 for a personal website?

263 points by abreckle 4y ago

Except, no one wants to get doxxed.

Is this something to do with Brian Lovin? I see the design of his personal site is a heavy influence, but didn't know it was open sourced? https://brianlovin.com/writing https://brianlovin.com/writing

thisisnotanexit 4y ago
It is open sourced here: https://github.com/brianlovin/briOS https://github.com/brianlovin/briOS
- philipwhiuk 4y ago
  As MIT, not as "tell people it's yours": https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b052dcd18e2f802c1fec https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    And the condition under which one is allowed to do the things the MIT license allows one to do: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. No more steps!
wongmjane 4y ago
The source code is really similar Not seeing Brian Lovin’s name in the LICENSE file in Nym either...
- lyptt 4y ago
  Looks like they've claimed Brian Lovin's work as their own, judging by this commit: https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b052dcd18e2f802c1fec https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - CaptArmchair 4y ago
    Yup. 10 commits, first commit was just 4 days ago. Same with their public website & docs. On Github, it's all barely 4 days old. Brian Lovin has released his work under the MIT license. AFAIK I believe this leaves it open to others to take the code and just run with it. Even so, looking at their value proposition, it's just a landing page that leads to https://nymhq.com/join https://nymhq.com/join where you can subscribe to a "waiting list" to join a server. They claim "Nym is currently in private beta with limited servers, but is accepting waitlist requests now." The "showcase" on the front page are just content fodder (AI? Web 2/3/5?) with quick, unstyled instances of their blogging software. The rest of that landing page seems to contain a lot of fluff as well. Frankly, I'm extremely apprehensive about supporting this.
- trampish 4y ago
  Good to see this fixed quickly: https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/a3530463ee323b8ba49296009c49d58be19b6f0c https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/a3530463ee323b8ba492960...
  - wongmjane 4y ago
    After being caught, they called erasing Brian Lovin’s credit from the LICENSE file as “A huge oversight on our part” https://twitter.com/nym_hq/status/1592176933445701633 https://twitter.com/nym_hq/status/1592176933445701633
    - NickBusey 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

julianlam 4y ago

The HN zeitgeist (at least as of 2021) was to use a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll. Why would we want to use Nym — speaking as someone who doesn't use either, that is. When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses basically no resources. [1] https://devnull.land/github-gist-blog https://devnull.land/github-gist-blog

devonallie 4y ago
I write all my posts in Obsidian and export them to Hugo and it’s fantastic!
- philipwhiuk 4y ago
  Honestly given HackerNews I was wondering if that was the actual rock at first.
zote 4y ago
Wouldn't adding Frontmatter to your markdown be a possible alternative to multiple files per gist to store metadata
- julianlam 4y ago
  Hey, thanks for reading! That is possibly a solution I could take. At the time I was focused mainly on getting something shipped asap. It's been working well so far, although I did run into that issue of having more than 30 posts, so the oldest ones have already fallen off. Oops!
- jayfae 4y ago
  Replied to the wrong message - but I did something similar here at https://www.jaynicolsmith.com/ https://www.jaynicolsmith.com/ (its still messy) - followed a tutorial somewhere and it processes my obsidian.md vault, make a note - push to git - tada - you can steal anything i have used for this from here https://github.com/Jayziv/summer-project https://github.com/Jayziv/summer-project

nunez 4y ago

If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace. My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this. Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

Affric 4y ago
Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is. 99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.
- nunez 4y ago
  thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at moving Windows licenses. alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw significant resources at making phones and tablets the best they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too many times before)
  - wintermutestwin 4y ago
    > The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.

5amdotis 4y ago

You should add a working rss feed link here: `<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS feed" href="undefined/writing/rss">`

lazyfanatic 4y ago

Anyone remember webrings? Technology is so circular, old becomes new, over and over again. "Join our network!" at the end reminded me of them.

ramses0 4y ago
Aside: it would be nice to have geographically local "web-rings". There was a sewing consortium place nearby that I randomly drove by, and also a local quilting specialty shop that I saw, why aren't they all connected to each other in a "makerspace" webring, or "craft" or "art" ring with like waypost signs: "next cool art store 3.5mi thattaway =>" Same with craft brewing, or scratch bakeries, etc. Technically it might be "advertising your competition", but in a different light, it's trying to expand the amount of time and $$$ that the target customer group is spending in _any_ of the specialty / niche areas.

nickthegreek 4y ago

Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.

terminal_d 4y ago
If all you need is a static website, you can do it for under $10/year if you use AWS S3. Alternatively, Cloudflare pages is free.
- croisillon 4y ago
  All your comments seem to be flagged by default, please reach an admin to clear that up
  - terminal_d 4y ago
    Thanks for the heads up, I contacted them via email. Turns out my account was flagged automatically and the ban's been lifted now.
    - croisillon 4y ago
      nice
mateomorris 4y ago
primo.so (FOSS)
mxuribe 4y ago
Review hosting providers on the folloiwing site: https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/ https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/ I use digital ocean, but their cost actualy rose a tad bit over the last year, and i have heard that hetzner has better pricing, though i have not yet used them. Again, just take a look at the above site, and can search for a low cost hosting provider. Others leverage github pages, etc...for free, but that seems antithetical to this greater topic of self-host your own. Good luck!

javajosh 4y ago

Great idea! But the problem, now, is on the client side. Readers need RSS. This lets authors publish at their own pace (which we can assume is relatively slowly) and doesn't burden the user with checking for new content manually. Of course, Twitter is a de facto RSS feed for some, and several other services (HN included) serve that role to some extent. But for the personal web, for those readers (and writers) of the web, you need RSS. The other problem is that a lot of writing is just not very good. Perhaps contraversially, I think that too is a tool problem: I've noticed that good authors take more time with their posts, get more feedback from more people, and even go to the trouble of thanking them in the post - which for very popular authors, like pg for example, is quite effective motivation and reward. But most authoring tools don't particularly encourage this behavior, preferring instead to give the author the least resistance possible to publishing. So, with either the return of Google Reader or equivalent, or the addition of a great RSS reader in Chrome, plus authoring tools that promote collaboration and revision, the personal web can flourish. Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.

aikendrum 4y ago
One of two things will happen. Either someone will build a huge business on top of a really great RSS reader, gradually adding features to feeds that customise to compete with substack / twitter etc; until the point where regular old feeds don't work as well, or at all in free readers. This is the IRC to Slack pipeline. Or, RSS will continue as an important technology, but one that's sidestepped in favour of social networks. I miss the old web, blogging, deep knowledge and intellectually diverse voices spread and hosted widely. But it stands in contrast to the centralising, oligopolistic tendencies of capitalism, and arguably high technology itself.
asdff 4y ago
>Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs. Or you can use existing blogware and rss. Plenty of people do use rss still today. Plenty of small and major media websites still offer it. Every few years there's a hn thread something akin to "ask hn: does anyone use rss still" at which point its the most engaged thread on the front page, with nearly all replies either saying that "yes I use it every day," or even "I got to this very thread from an rss feed." Honestly, if you are a blogger and want to select a readership base that has certain characteristics you are interested in (maybe it overlaps with your stereotypical hn user: techie or in the technology industry with more money than the median worker), you should offer an rss feed to capture these readers who might not even bother with platforms like twitter at all.

poszlem 4y ago

It's not going to be an original take if I say that I absolutely adored the early internet with the personal websites everywhere. Comparing it with the internet of today it makes me think of the difference between a high street in a small city, full of different shops and cafes vs. a shopping mall, where everything looks the same, is loud, smelly, and obnoxious. (Of course the early internet had a lot of loud, smell, and obnoxious places, but those were much easier to avoid). I also like the idea of people hosting their own sites. It was IMO much easier to talk about the free speech if you were hosting your own website and didn't have a "connection broker" (Twitter, Facebook) between you and your readers. The whole argument of "it's a private bussines, therefore it can just kick you out" goes out the window (unless you want to go and moles the ISP, but it's easier to argue that they are just an utility provider).

s3000 4y ago

> Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Are there plans for ActivityPub integration?

falcolas 4y ago

Dear Nym, check your layout on narrow screens. It's about 50% whitespace, thanks to the two un-dismissable blank columns on the left. https://imgur.com/a/0ilhUAw https://imgur.com/a/0ilhUAw

DarthNebo 4y ago

Dunno if all this banning & suppression of folks by private entities & governments is the push towards RSS again &/or some melding with IPFS

surprisetalk 4y ago

Personal websites are useful tools for organizing and re-organizing your mind. For me, a few simple practices have been life-changing: 1. Keeping a public list of soon/current/recent projects forces me to keep priorities straight over long stretches of time. 2. Maintaining a monthly newsletter organizes my life into personal "sprints". It also provides a tiny community of like-minded people. 3. Essays supercharge reflections on deep questions. If you have any big ideas or strong opinions, public writing is incredible distillation. 4. Writing for fun is fun! It's a productive craft well-suited to curious/obsessive minds (much like programming). --- https://taylor.town https://taylor.town

distcs 4y ago

Personal websites still do live. Here on HN too I have seen blog posts from independent websites/blogs run by individuals. What has changed though is the rapid rise of content platforms like Twitter, Medium, Substack and the likes where the sheer number of posts overwhelm the number of posts individual website owners can produce. But still the independent websites continue to run and stay alive. Some of them have quality content too and appear on HN many times. Is there a community/forum/channel of these independent website owners somewhere? Would love to hang out there.

donatj 4y ago

Bring back webrings? They were a great easy way to stumble on personal sites.

KIFulgore 4y ago
Man, I miss webrings. I could rabbit-hole down a group of sites about a particular interest for hours.

_jcrossley 4y ago

Yes please. With the “creator culture” from TikTok etc, I think if personal sites could be made _that_ easy and fun, they’d come back in fashion. Personally I’m ready for MySpace 2.0

dzuc 4y ago

The whole beauty of personal websites is their individuality. This completely misses the point.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

The showcase is 3 blogs from the same guy all with limited content? Okay.. so someone copied Brian Lovin's blog platform and is proud of themselves.

DustinBrett 4y ago

Totally agree as someone who has been making personal sites since I was a kid in '98. My latest iteration has been nearly 2 years in the making now. I had a WordPress blog for many years but finally decided it was time as a software developer to have a site that was custom. The core idea of the site is as if you've RDP'd into my Windows 10 machine and can see all my files and apps. Everything runs client side which was also something important to me. If interested please check it out, I nickname it daedalOS and it's also open source. https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/

agambrahma 4y ago

IMO making "a new Wordpress" doesn't feel like a great alternative -- Wordpress is pretty good as it is, and you have the option of self-hosting fairly painlessly if you want to. The fun of late-90s website-making is real though, but I don't see a turn towards that for the vast majority of people. One nice corner of optimism is projects like Glitch [1], which give just enough space to explore, go wild, and quickly host what you make. [1]: https://glitch.com https://glitch.com

lkrubner 4y ago

The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed to bring a libel suit against Twitter because of Section 230, nor would it be fruitful for her to file thousands (or even millions) of suits against the anonymous people who post that particular rumor. And so, for all practical purposes, the normal laws regarding libel have been suspended. And yet people still need some way to defend their reputations against lies. Do you want people to set up personal websites? The answer is obvious: repeal Section 230. Once Section 230 is gone, sites such as Twitter and Facebook will simply cease to exist. They will either shut down on their own, or they will be sued into oblivion. Everyone would be forced to set up their own website, and then take full legal responsibility for what is posted to that website. Once Section 230 is gone, then the normal rules of libel come back into force, as they existed for several centuries. Some extremists might regard this as censorship, but for several centuries the normal laws of libel were not regarded as censorship. A civil society can only prevail where people are required to take full legal responsibility for the things they say in public spaces. At the current moment, our laws regarding libel are made almost useless because the publisher of the lies are protected by Section 230, and going after each anonymous individual, when thousands or even millions of people are repeating the lie, is too burdensome for even wealthy individuals to pursue the cases. When wealthy people ask their lawyers "Can I sue?" the lawyers remind them of the Streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect I do not know what will happen in the future, but I am certain the current set of arrangements cannot survive. People must have some way of defending their reputations, and the traditional way of doing so has been through our laws regarding libel and slander. To my mind, the most obvious way forward is to repeal Section 230. Large sites such as Twitter and Facebook would likely vanish, and people would then be forced to set up personal websites, and they would be responsible for everything said on those websites. Like newspaper publishers, they could publish many writers, if they wanted to, but they would face the normal legal burdens of libel law, just like every newspaper.

bovermyer 4y ago

codepoet80 4y ago

Slightly OT: what framework is in use for that website? The responsive approach looks a lot like a modern version of Enyo (https://sdk.webosarchive.org/enyo2sampler/ https://sdk.webosarchive.org/enyo2sampler/)

ripsawridge 4y ago

I've had my site (https://www.mountainwerks.org https://www.mountainwerks.org) going since 1998, and for sure, I am myself the primary user. But over time, my gosh, there is a lot of content. It started as a log of trips to the mountains. I found religion through trying to pay homage to nature by remembering each "piece" of it. Because an attitude of thankfulness gradually became nature (thanks to going out so danged much). I wouldn't know any other way to live. Old ideas are often gold.

superultra 4y ago

I think the flaw in this logic is that somehow it's technically hard to start a personal blog, so they invent a technical solution (a better platform). But there are plenty of great platforms that are easy to use, Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress.com, etc. The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social. My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of people or more who were or would be vested in a so-called "personal web" as there were 10 or 20 years ago. But I think that we've all allowed ourselves to be trained that the levels of engagement and web visitors that we would have been happy with 10-20 years ago just doesn't match up to what social platforms can provide, so most people that would have a personal blog just aren't. I know my personal blog from 20 years ago, which I posted to daily, feels very small and quaint. I also know that I would be disappointed with "engagement." A more personal web doesn't really need better platforms or tech, it needs a mindset reset.

nickstinemates 4y ago
To add to this, centralization has been such a big part of the past 20 years with Social Media that it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It has and continues to be an "and" proposition -> social media presence + "personal"/brand/corporate/? website must go hand in hand. The people who get the flywheel right get an outsized piece of typical mind share and opportunity.
asdff 4y ago
I think what makes it difficult is that there's a sense that self hosting (or coding in general) is not going to click with you if you aren't already a techie. People just shut down, but its not their fault, that's just what marketing has told them for 25 years. Marketing comes in lying, saying its hard to do these things, that you need to pay someone to hold your hand and keep you safe, and doing otherwise means you are a fool, since they can point to their massive populations of sheep that already believed their lie as some sort of justification for why they are right. In reality, its easy to code. Its easy to set up self hosting. Its easy to write your own html. It probably takes as long for you to get up to speed with the basics of these things as it does for you to learn some gui tool that you have to pay for somehow to do a very limited set of these things. I think of all my accountant friends, absolute wizards in excel which is no easy feat, who would be able to make money hand over fist if they just took even less time to learn the basics of programming and data science than it did to get so proficient at excel. Unfortunately the big lie of technology has hit them too, and they have convinced themselves that they are somehow mentally unable to understand this stuff, or that they should have gone to school for it and now have no hope of ever learning it, even though their expertise in excel proves they are perfectly capable of learning this sort of stuff if they gave it a chance. It's not harder, its actually easy, 7 year olds can wrap their head around computer code, so that means you can too with just a little bit of patience. Unfortunately patience is also in short supply these days thanks to marketing setting expectations that all good things should be instant gratification or they aren't good at all.

bobajeff 4y ago

Could someone tell me what is meant by "just-in-time WebSockets loading"? Google has failed me.

steve_john 4y ago

misingnoglic 4y ago

Wow, thanks for listing me as a personal website that you love! It'll give me some motivation to write new blog posts. For anyone curious it's the aryaboudaie.com one

davesque 4y ago

I always love having an excuse to repost this: https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/ This is my idea of the personal web.

13415 4y ago

It's a standard to have a personal website, at least among my colleagues and generally among people I find interesting.

towawy 4y ago

How do you find a decent domain on a trusted TLD in the year 2022 for a personal website?