This is a nice post. Thanks for sharing it here. The only thing I would like to add to this fine article is that it is perfectly fine for a personal website to simply be a loose collection of pages arranged in an arbitrary manner. Not every personal website needs to be a blog.
Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.
Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
I ran across this[0] post about a month ago, which makes an argument against the chronological blog, and to rather embrace the digital garden. I quite liked the idea. For so long it's felt like a blog is the default, but I find browsing pages without a blog much more interesting. I think it also removes that pressure to post all the time, as adding content is simply adding content. It doesn't matter when it was last updated. Looking at my history (which I had to use to find this), I deleted all my started and abandoned blogs the same day I read this.
edit... Ironically, I just clicked "All Articles" on his home page and it's a chronological blog... At least there is some curation to it.
It’s not clear to me who this is useful for. If you have a server already, yes, it’s trivial to put up an HTML page. But most people with servers, I would guess, already know that. Most people _don’t_have servers, though, and it seems to me that thats what the “easier” ways of getting started (hosted wordpress, Cloudflare pages, github pages, etc.) are for. I agree, though, that it’s good to start with plain HTML. I’d probably recommend that new people go with a serverless setup like Cloudflare pages rather than get into administrating a VM, though.
The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files. Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments, etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes "What should I write about?" [0]
My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.
That's how I did it in GradSchool. I took over the web page another student started for the grad-level algorithms class I was taking. The student who started it discovered he had volunteered for too many things. I jumped on it when they needed to change because I needed the extra credit.
Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.
┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
│ how-to-make-a-damn-website.html │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ <title>How to Make a Damn Website</title> │
│ <h1>How to Make a Damn Website</h1> │
│ │
│ │
│ <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start │
│ or they get stuck.</p> │
┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙
HTML is very forgiving! You can start really simple and work your way up to more complexity when you need it.
Web browsers are indeed forgiving when it comes to incomplete HTML. Some time ago, I did a small experiment to see what minimal HTML is required to display a simple 'Hello' page while adhering to the specification, passing HTML Tidy validation and also satisfying the Nu HTML Checker. As far as I can tell, it is this:
I have seen at least one blog where the author updated his RSS feed manually, but it's one of the first pieces of busywork that you want to automate away, after applying the page template and entering <p> tags at every double-newline. Jekyll is useful for that; it builds automatically in GitHub Pages, which also conveniently serves as a free web host.
I think the intent was making a blog has additional requirements one might not need to just make a website, a la what the "The Hard Way" section tries to argue against, not a claim a blog is not also a website (anything the page says not to use will also lead you to having a website as well - just with more than minimal work).
E.g. the section covering RSS for your post is longer than the section covering HTML, you don't really need a fixed structure, and you don't need to think of a story to write unless that's what you want to do. You can just post a picture of your cat and try to add googly eyes later if that's what floats your boat. Or just "Hello World" and let your mind go from there.
In the past, I've had a few visitors to my website look at a possibly silly post and ask me why it was even worth blogging about.
That is when I bring out the expanded form of 'blog' in all its glory. It is my weblog. Of course I am going to log whatever I want for myself, regardless of whether it is interesting to others. I do not need to subscribe to someone else's notion of what is interesting in order to decide what belongs on my own weblog.
People might want to use RSS to check on your site for updates whether you write it by hand or use some kind of CMS to generate it for you.
WordPress was a technical mess before their founder had a psychotic break and their company posted features advocating for business owners to put bait-and-switch AI slop on their websites.
And then you find out that the company running the server misconfigured caching, and suddenly half your userbase sees a different version than the other half.
I love websites, something about stumbling across someone’s random content put together with old school hand typed code just stirs a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially if the do something “weird” that doesn’t follow any kind of modern trend or convention.
Another technique (or consideration?) that deserves attention is how to get output from notebook engines (e.g. Quarto) to play well with your existing plain text website... while Quarto does a decent job of plain text websites, it does the best job if it takes over the whole website.
Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.
Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
edit... Ironically, I just clicked "All Articles" on his home page and it's a chronological blog... At least there is some curation to it.
[0] https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden/
When I next start a website I'm just going to channel my old Geocities days.
But indeed, a loose collection of simple pages is better than nothing at all...
You are completely right, just write the damn thing and the blog can come later.
My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about
Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.
No, you need less than that! :-)
HTML is very forgiving! You can start really simple and work your way up to more complexity when you need it.Doesn't take much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer
http://pho.tiyuti.com
Just lists of title, pic, blurb, url
E.g. the section covering RSS for your post is longer than the section covering HTML, you don't really need a fixed structure, and you don't need to think of a story to write unless that's what you want to do. You can just post a picture of your cat and try to add googly eyes later if that's what floats your boat. Or just "Hello World" and let your mind go from there.
That is when I bring out the expanded form of 'blog' in all its glory. It is my weblog. Of course I am going to log whatever I want for myself, regardless of whether it is interesting to others. I do not need to subscribe to someone else's notion of what is interesting in order to decide what belongs on my own weblog.
WordPress was a technical mess before their founder had a psychotic break and their company posted features advocating for business owners to put bait-and-switch AI slop on their websites.