Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

cheapskatesguide.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 80 posts

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#71

Post by II2II »

technothrasher wrote: post #69

I remember the good old days when personal websites ruled the web. I even found mine listed in the Netscape daily "rants and raves" directory for jokingly professing my undying love for Lindsay Wagner. That listing led to a local newspaper reporter contacting me for a story about people who had web pages. I had a nice big quote in the article about how this new medium broke down the barriers to publishing and allowed…

> I had a nice big quote in the article about how this new medium broke down the barriers to publishing and allowed all us common people to have our own voice broadcast out without needing to play the big publishers games or having to worry about the finances involved in publishing content.

Many of us forgot that technical knowledge was a barrier to online publishing. Even if you used a program that made website development as simple as using a word processor, you still had to figure out how to secure space to host the site and how to upload the site. Those applications simplified that as well, yet all of those simplified steps still led to many books to guide people through the process.

Yes, there were other factors at play. Social media and biased search engine results were certainly part of the reason.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#72

Post by djsumdog »

There are a lot of good personal websites people are listing. A lot of them probably only update once or twice a month. That's why it's so important to use RSS!

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so...

Sure you can just go to HackerNews and see what people are submitting, but what if you want to be the person who submits that amazing post for those sweet sweet Internet points? Just use one RSS reader site and fill it with EVERYTHING. Load random person OPML from Github, blogs and whateve.. and every once in a while, scroll through the titles, see if anything is remotely interesting, and if it turns out to be gold, put it on HN or your Mastodon account or Lemmy or (barf) Reddit or whatever.

Not everyone is gonna have your mad RSS skills. Other people have real lives and can barely digest what Twitter and Facebook feed them.

And by scrolling through stuff, you're not getting doused by those bullshit algorithms. You're in control of how you view, sort and filter your feed (and maybe use another RSS reader or one that supports profiles for the important stuff).

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#73

Post by phist_mcgee »

text_exch wrote: post #9

I run an email newsletter[1] that aims to highlight the interesting content found on personal blogs. It's a single link every other day to something interesting, the kind of blog posts that you come across every once in a while that really make you think. The overwhelming feedback is that being able to read the kind of non-viscerally-targeted news and analyses that aren't easily found online is incredibly valuable. […

Just an fyi as well. Your site did not load any content for me with the Disconnect.me and uBlock Origin blockers. I had to disable these to get the signup form to appear, and have the loading icons disappear.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#74

Post by sellyme »

yobuko wrote: post #29

I really enjoy the articles put out on this website, as well as the points the author raises in each. I always enjoy seeing it appear on HN. A query though - Is it possible to have some verification of the "top 100" personal sites claim? For example, years ago if you searched for "Sumerian gods" - you would get all manner of results, but nowadays you will always get Wikipedia as the top link, junk mixed in, and then…

Honestly, sometimes the "junk" lists are fairly useful. They contain absolutely minimal content (because that would require work), but hit all of the necessary keywords for the subject matter. This turns out to allow extremely efficient lookup of a word or name you may have forgotten, whereas trying to find the information you're looking for in Britannica could require reading several pages of dry information before you end up seeing "Ninhursag" and realising that's what you were looking for.

Just make sure your ad-blocker is working before clicking on them and it's all gravy.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#76

Post by Hoenoe »

rikroots wrote: post #68
dheera wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually would write more, if people would read it. Unfortunately, if I write a blog on my personal website, nobody is going to find it. And I don't like Medium for their policy of forcing people to paywall their content in return for visibility. If I post a link to a blog post on my website to Facebook, Facebook downranks it and doesn't show it to most of my friends (seriously, WTF). The only thing I can do is pos…

I don't write much on my blogs nowadays, but that's mainly because I lack inspiration. For the past few years my 'blogging' has mostly been long rambling rant-thoughts about obscure stuff on Facebook: it gives my friends something to chuckle about. When I do write proper blog posts, the lack of an audience doesn't bother me anymore. It is (as they say) what it is. It's also liberating: I can write what I like without…

I thought I read somewhere in the HN comments that Medium articles are automatically down voted by the algorithm. I rarely see them. But I might be mistaken.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#78

Post by mro_name »

6ak74rfy wrote: post #58

I recently setup a personal website. My intent was to migrate a few old blog posts from WordPress and, more importantly, make my notes public. After trying a bunch of note-taking apps, I realized that most of my private notes didn't contain any private information, so I thought why not just make them public as-is. My setup is (almost) free, mostly built on open components (so, no vendor lock in) and pretty low-latenc…

I also chose hugo a year ago with pretty much the same motivation, but meanwhile I may even go with plain html plus some scripts creating tag and overview list pages and no other tool at all.

I'm just sick of breaking updates.

Search and comments are radical: https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-making-of/

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#79

Post by mro_name »

abruzzi wrote: post #49

my father (75yo) still obsessively updates his personal website (using FrontPage!) For years he was proud that his article on Hill's Criteria of Causation was the top hit on google for a search on "hills criteria" or similar. At the time Wikipedia had no article on it (he's now #4 since wikipedia has a article as well as a couple of medical sites.) His site has the look of a personal webpage from 1997, but since reti…

That's great!

Tools are just means to an end and overrated compared to the actual end.

Changing quarterly to the "most efficient" tool is a lot of work over time.

Sticking to one seems to get things done.

And static websites save you the headaches of security - I think your father can't imagine what it means having to patch a critical bug in node/php/mysql/whatever during your vacation when travelling.

And I guess, he may not think of this kind of publishing as being for the "technically minded" or "tech-savvy" ones only.

And the stuff can be read in ages to come.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#80

Post by 6ak74rfy »

mro_name wrote: post #78
6ak74rfy wrote: post #58

I recently setup a personal website. My intent was to migrate a few old blog posts from WordPress and, more importantly, make my notes public. After trying a bunch of note-taking apps, I realized that most of my private notes didn't contain any private information, so I thought why not just make them public as-is. My setup is (almost) free, mostly built on open components (so, no vendor lock in) and pretty low-latenc…

I also chose hugo a year ago with pretty much the same motivation, but meanwhile I may even go with plain html plus some scripts creating tag and overview list pages and no other tool at all. I'm just sick of breaking updates. Search and comments are radical: https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-making-of/

Search, yes, and I need to spend an afternoon to get that working. (From what little I've investigated so far, it seems like it'll be some work to get that to work.)
Post reply on HN