from Hacker News

Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website

by spzb on 2/22/25, 2:29 PM with 106 comments

• by neebz on 2/26/25, 11:03 AM

  I remember back in the summer of 1996 in Pakistan our household was one of the first few to have to internet.

  At that time angelfire.com used to give free webspace. My brother got hold of a pirated version of CorelDraw and setup a fan website of his favorite rock band Junoon, which incidentally is still online: https://www.angelfire.com/pa/JUNOON

  And then when my brother met the band at a concert and they actually recognized him due to the website. I guess first time we realized how impactful internet is going to be.

• by aosaigh on 2/26/25, 12:05 PM

  I wonder is this a sign of the times? I've (nearly ...) quit all social media and re-embraced my personal website. It's also under construction, but it's going to be the main place I update everything (work, personal, photos, updates etc.). I don't care if no one reads it. It's mine.

• by Angostura on 2/26/25, 9:35 AM

  20 years ago in the UK most ISPs gave you a little bit of web space free with your account - and an email box of two. One of the sad changes that happened is that this has gone now.

  It used to make it really easy to have a cool little website. I used mine for a simple blog - now gone.

• by adzm on 2/26/25, 10:21 AM

  Shout out to my favorite one-joke website, https://www.sometimesredsometimesblue.com/ which has remained a constant in my life over the years and has never let me down

• by FreesiaGaul on 2/26/25, 9:35 AM

  I 1000% stand behind this. When I was thinking how I was going to make my personal website personal - I really had to think. One of the great charms in "websites of the past" is all of the neat gifs and unconventional formatting. It has really inspired me in making mine (it's still under construction at freesiagaul.com).

  Of course I'm not amazing, but frontend should feel like art, because that's what it is.

• by ksec on 2/22/25, 2:45 PM

  I think the addition of "comments" on webpage is more of a cruse than a blessing.

• by bix6 on 2/26/25, 9:25 AM

  That was a fun read. Love the default theme and ability to swap themes. I recently deleted IG so maybe it’s time for a personal website. The world needs more 5 course meal generators :)

• by rchaud on 2/26/25, 3:38 PM

  As an erstwhile teenaged Geocities fanatic, all these "old web was good, let's go back to it" posts miss some key factors that block such a way back.

  1. Most of the Old Web site experiences were one-and-done. We checked out a website, then checked out the next one on the webring or Geocities neighborhood. Unless the site "looked" like it was updated with news, we generally didn't re-visit the site, or really even remember it. Your old website could feel just as disposable and stale as the average social media post.

  2. RSS and algo-free chronological feeds won't return us to a time of civility. I have never stopped using RSS. But the system isn't designed to support a feed where 10% of the sites post 90% of the content. The experience is awful, there is no way to order things so as to see a diversified feed. RSS of course also flattens web pages into a lifeless scroll of text, defeating the purpose of home-made web pages.

  3. Webdev is too complicated now compared to a time when your ISP gave you an FTP folder and Notepad was all that was needed to write some HTML and display some images. Modern webdev (code editor, SSL, hosting, mobile-ready CSS) creates an adverse selection problem where the people with the time and skill to make websites, already do so in their work and thus create the most boring websites imaginable....code-heavy tech blogs or wispy 'digital transformation' thought leadership.

• by tiniuclx on 2/26/25, 1:23 PM

  I set up my personal website [0] quite a while ago - 2020 or so. I've been updating it a lot more regularly in the last few years and I've found it very rewarding. It's great to have my own place where I am in full control of everything, and I've also learned a lot about webdev which is not my core focus usually.

  The best part by far is people going out of their way to get in touch & let me know that the found a post of mine interesting or useful.

  [0] https://tiniuc.com

• by ChrisArchitect on 2/26/25, 12:48 PM

  More on the POSSE approach (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)

  https://indieweb.org/POSSE

• by fjallstrom on 2/26/25, 1:39 PM

  I found this (super short) episode inspiring, on the same topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5n6BYw5VU7cLipoRKE1COU (The Poetic Internet, with Kristoffer Tjalve)

• by scotty79 on 2/26/25, 1:13 PM

  I think people who'd like to bring a piece of old world back have a blind spot for the fact that social networks and their algorithms provide essential service of content discovery and possibly enabling building up on existing content (comments, reactions).

  Any attempt to bring back home pages must essentially include a way to discover them. Search engines has been dead for that purpose for more than a decade.

  If you want to give back autonomy to publishers, your solution must also grant the same autonomy to commenters. You need to enable all people to control their content, whether they are original posters or pre-posters and commenters.

• by reitoei on 2/26/25, 2:16 PM

  Is there a place/system for discovering or aggregating personal websites like this? Remember old school "directory" sites and tools like del.icio.us? There were awesome compared to being at the mercy of google.

• by hsnice16 on 2/26/25, 1:41 PM

  This is so great!

  I am working on this - https://personal-logs.vercel.app/anime

• by dmilicic on 2/26/25, 10:12 AM

  I don't remember the last time I had so much fun building a web project than working on my personal website: https://dmilicic.com/

  The spirit of doing what you want is exactly what inspired me to do it, it's not the best nor the fastest web but it doesn't matter, I simply wanted to do it in a different way (Flutter & WASM).

• by laurentlb on 2/26/25, 9:57 AM

  I expected to see an "under construction" animated gif, but what I found was better.

  The garden theme made me smile. Now, I'm considering redesigning my website.

  I removed the links from my website a decade ago, but I enjoyed looking at the section on the page. Not sure what I'll do about it.

• by lawlesst on 2/27/25, 1:53 PM

  The first love letter I've enjoyed reading in quite some time. It left me wondering if my minimal, rarely updated website of ~12 years qualifies since it's hosted on big tech backed Github pages.

• by listenfaster on 2/26/25, 2:46 PM

  I really enjoyed this and the ensuing conversation here. Great list of links at the end too! Always looking for things to bookmark as inspiring motivators on days when it all feels pointless - this is going on the list.

• by mojuba on 2/26/25, 8:20 AM

  And not a word about discoverability?

  The web went the way it went because ultimately centralization wins both in terms economics and discoverability. You host your blog (or rather "blog") on Facebook for free and get a chance to be discovered by strangers, for better or worse.

  Not saying it's necessarily a good thing, because now you are at a mercy of corporate censorship that isn't even required to abide by the users' constitutional rights and freedoms. They can limit your speech in any way they like and it's what they do: their platform, their rules.

  On the other hand, without centralization the web is expensive and not very discoverable. Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about, in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.

  There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.

• by santoshalper on 2/26/25, 1:24 PM

  People who host their own websites are becoming like vegans in that they won't STFU about it. Having your own website is not a substitute for having a personality.