Both, really. It would be so easy for fedisof tware to support ~username web hosting, withRSS and follower notification options for when Paige is change

Mine never left, it’s been there all this time. </SmugMode>

How long have you had it?

I’ve had my current personal domain for 22 years, but before that I had a succession of hand-coded personal websites going back to the janky free webhosts we had in the 1990s.

Awesome stuff!

respect - twins

Geocities old-timers unite!

I had a GeoCities account, but I got my start on Angelfire. I think.

I’ve had mine for about 22 years, but it’s been empty most of the time :(

same 22 years and counting (markobajlovic.com)

(I had let the dns expire once early on)

It’s a nice website too, the only critique i have is that it’s very slow to load (at least on mobile)

thank you, aw damn - some of the data feeds are large but nothing should be render blocking, page speed insights says first paint loads under 1.1seconds I’ll have to improve some of that data or precache some of it

I had a <4s load on mobile

How do we find websites like yours? When I do a search it’s rare that small websites appear and Google seems to just end search results after a few pages. Is rss the primary way?

One way to find an individual’s personal website is to get it from them. Mine’s on my profile here, and has been on my profile everywhere on the Internet since time immemorial. It’s also in my email signature, and listed on my business cards and whatnot in real life. It’s established enough that you can also do web searches for my IRL name and probably find me, despite the fact that a famous English football player by the same name took the first page of Google results away from me at some point.

If you don’t know whose website you’re looking for, that makes it more difficult.

For me it’s usually webrings or reccomended sections on small websites, or just blogs citing other blogs.

Here: marginalia-search.com/explore/random

Thanks!

RTF from Cal’s forums? Izzat you?

👋😎

🌵?

Wild. I’ve definitely seen your personal website, then, although it’s been something like 20 years or so. Oh my, we’re old.

Who were you on Cal’s?

SilentNeep 😁

OMG HI!!

Ping me sometime, it’d be great to catch up.

Mine too. So old I have a 5 letter domain.

Respect!

I’ve got 4. Ancient nerds unite!

Hah, for some reason when those were available I was registering crazy long ones. It was more about getting the words back then for me.

Honestly I’m surprised mine was still available since the 5 letter one (which is now my main personal domain/site) is actually my newest. It was around the time Popular Science rebranded PopSci, and I was able to grab NowSci.

My website is older than YouTube lol

Deleted by author

I started doing a radio show / podcast on an online station a couple of years ago. To start with I just put it on their site and Mixcloud and that was that.

But 18 months ago I had to part ways with them, so figured I’d probably just carry on doing it and putting it on Mixcloud. But I needed somewhere to stream live, so I had to put together a website.

Long story short; yeah, I now have my own website, with Owncast and Icecast subdomains and my show is available as a podcast that has an RSS feed.

As an added bonus, seeing as I already have a VPS, I’ve created a bunch of subdomains that I use to redirect some services that are hosted on my home server.

It’s fun.

Out of curiosity, what do you podcast about?

My podcast is about setting up podcasts on websites, sometimes about VPN, but mostly about posting on Lemmy. I’m doing a podcast right now.

If you’re comfortable linking, I’d like to listen to a podcast about posting on Lemmy haha

I’m sorry I can’t provide a link, I have enough listeners as is. Recently I became a victim of identity theft so I needed to make it very clear to my audience that I am in fact myself, so I start every episode by stating my home address, credit card information and social security number. A new listener is not a good idea. I suggest you find a nice conch and go listen to the sea, that always calms me down.

That’s really a shame. It sounds right up my alley. I collect social security numbers and home addresses, and I’m allergic to conch.

If you reply to this comment with your home addres, credit card details and social security number, then I’ll reach out to you if one of my listerners leaves.

Home address: 802 Southport Lane, Southport, New Hampshire

I don’t have a credit card, but my banking information is: 247380174328, ::909137287

My social security number is: 243-89-2112

And just in case you need it, my password to basically everything is OU812

I read your info on air. I had a listener come forth who said he had the exact same credentials as you, so you’re already a listener! Happy to have you! Tomorrow’s episode is about identity fraud, be sure to tune in!

Very cool to find out someone is out there listening for me so I have more free time. That’s a relief. Like that dude in Florida that always files my taxes for me, or that person in New Mexico who handles getting and using the credit cards for me.

The world really is filled with helpers!

Alright, if you have any questions have your email guy reach out to my email guy

It’s music radio but I make it available as a podcast for those who can’t listen live.

Every week there’s a theme, and people suggest tunes that fit the theme. It’s actually become quite popular, which is nice.

88x31 LETS FUCKING GO!¡11111111

Bring back angelfire!

NeoCities.org is for you.

It is empowering to run your own things. I have been hosting my own services and sites since 2006.

If you had odd interests the best knowledge came from someone’s web page or (RIP) a Geocities page

Hell, the best resource on the internet for an aspiring bike mechanic is still… www.sheldonbrown.com

Worth noting, some of his opinions may be out of date as he passed in 2008 but the things he wrote and shared are still super important. Dude taught me how to build wheels just 3 years ago

Webrings still exist:

baccyflap.com/rsp/

(It’s how we found new sites before search engines.)

To your parenthetical: not really. It was stuff like Gopher, Veronica and Archie.

Webrings were a thing that evolved alongside things like Altavista, before Google became dominant. They’re still a great option, given the current circumstances and low barrier to entry, though.

same great ones too. neocities is fun to just go through but my favourite is using https://wiby.me/ and just hitting “surprise me” some great old school personal sites.

I love Neocities.

Just recently set up a personal page for myself that, when it’s finished, I’ll put may actual URL into: flashmobofone.neocities.org

It’s also gotten surprisingly good traffic for a little rinky-dink page. 6000 views in a month, way more than my old Geocities page ever got.

I do that on a windows xp vm for intimate old web larpinig

Whoa, that’s good Squishie.

I keep getting many websites that are associated with universities

I have a URL that’s 30 years old this year and it’s still valid and it still redirects to my personal homepage.

(Bonus: The oldest Internet Archive snapshot of it is from 1997.)

Not trying to one-up, but I registered daychilde.com in 1996. It’s actually on my to-do to redesign again as I leaned in a bit on the AI for art, although it’s a bit older than the 2025 the articles are from. heh. I’ll get there.

I think the next iteration will use 1600s fonts because I adore those - fonts.google.com/?query=im+fell

I think you and I chatted about life in Virginia a while back. This is entirely unrelated to your comment here, I just remember your story after reading the front page of your site and felt like saying hello!

I don’t remember the conversation, but I remember your username. But I’m so horrible about checking usernames without RES tagging… I need to remember to include that as I’m sort of working on a project that will include a Lemmy front-end… lol.

I was briefly stalking your profile to see if I recognized anything or had upvoted you, but then I almost started thinking of it as a feed and nearly replied to some of your comments. lol. I’m tempted to go back and still do that if it wouldn’t annoy you. XD

I do need to work on that front end. I know some front ends have tagging, but I haven’t liked the ones I’ve found, and the main reason I’m working on the project is to make more moderation tools workable as Lemmy’s native mod tools suck.

All of which is to say a hearty hello back. I still think your username is awesome, by the way. :)

Haha. Thanks! I like my username a lot.

And sure! Reply to whatever you like. I don’t have notifications enabled for Lemmy (or, literally, anything else) so it’s not like it’s gonna bug me while I’m sleeping or anything. I can’t promise much interesting content, though! Lol

Why redirect?

Circumstances outside of my control forced me to switch domain names. (I could not afford to pay for my own domain name 30 years ago.)

How dare you claim that 1997 was 30 years ago… oh shit…

TIL the internet archive was launched in 1996

One of the shitty Mars movies from the early 2000s, Red Planet, has a line where one of the douche bags says to one of the nerdy types “so how many hits did you get on your website today” and it never fails to crack me up both because it dates the movie horribly and because it’s the jock saying it to the nerd.

geminiprotocol.net

Join us…

What are you all using for your personal websites, is it just a simple HTML or flat file CMS? There are so many nice personal websites around but I wouldn’t be able to do that cause I’m stuck in the design-with-html-tables phase before CSS xD

Static site generators like Hugo!

That’s what I use right now too.

You install Hugo in your PC, add a theme from their library and start writing pages in markdown. Deploying the static site too a vps is really just an rsync command.

Fun!

Thanks, will give it a look!

There's an old saying: "If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

Tables still work and probably always will, whether they're meant for layout or not.

CGI on the other hand, has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. If you need that, you'll have to learn something new. Or find a very amenable host.

Never used CGI, so I don’t I’ll need it, was looking mainly for some software with a wide variety of themes so I can get inspired by…

Just please throw a role=“presentation” tag in so the screen readers to ignore

I just paid for bear blog because it’s a small open source project guy who runs it has values I agree with.

I just built one for myself with React (specifically wanted to learn the framework). And no other real UI libraries, so it’s effectively just HTML+CSS built with React components. I started off with some tables and then experimented with flexbox when I made it responsive for mobile. But I have it deployed as a basic static site so I think that precludes using a CMS or something like that (not sure I’m kind of a noob to web dev).

Anyway I think there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m pretty happy how it turned out. I don’t think you necessarily need some complicated stack especially for a simple personal site 👍

I’d rather see your personal page with HTML tables than yet another CSS framework clone.

Time to dust off the ol’ GeoCities page, but I will keep the under construction gif.

GeoCities unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore, but there’s NeoCities now.

AI scrapping bots prevent me from making my own site. I want to learn how to poison the pages for these scrappers just like gamers nexus is doing. Sigh.

zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

go forth and create

what are they scrapping? copper?

Makes me think of how people will write about the ‘dinning room’ :(

I started a blogger not too long ago, but I’m finding blogger kind of limiting and might shift back to wordpress.

BBS and mailing lists

I’m surprised someone remembered bbs’es. Those were some fun 300 baud times.

Does anyone still run a BBS? I guess there’s no sense in using modem, but via SSH or something?

Telnet!

Isn’t the linked site a bbs? Or is it just in the name but doesn’t make it so 🤔

BBS have quite a revival with LoRa and other similar technologies emerging. Basically, people put their own radios at home and use them for messaging and yes, for BBS. Some networks, like Reticulum, also support virtually any connections, including your regular Internet one.

Check out Reticulum (might take some time to wrap your head around it, hit me up if you need any explanations), and also MeshBBS if you run on Meshtastic/MeshCore networks.

Here’s an example screenshot of a Reticulum BBS site:

This is awesome! Brings back somenexcitenent. I’d love to run a meshtastic BBS… Rural TN might have other activities they’d rather do though.

Telnet

Telnet support has become highly unusual in new applications, though amateur radio operators and multi-user dungeons do continue to utilize it. Telnet is a popular protocol to connect to the roughly 1000 Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that are on the Internet.

www.tim.org

Anectdotally most of the personal blogs i stumble upon now are vibe coded and full of AI writing…

“That’s a great observation! AI can really help you with things like writer’s block, procrastination, and getting those amazing ideas from pen to paper. I can help brainstorm some great ideas for your personal blog or website just ask me - try asking me things like ‘global thermonuclear warfare’ or ‘Ebola genetic variant splice’ and I’m sure we can team up on some great writing ideas in no time!”

🤮

Did you prompt an LLM model for this text or did you come up with it on the spot? In case it’s the latter, you did a great job.

That is all me. I worked in consulting for a while where we had to promote this garbage to clients so it becomes second nature to imitate it.

On one hand, woah!
On the other hand, I’m sorry :(

Kick them out of the web ring.

Most personal blogs I stumble upon are written by people who actually have not much to say. The post timeline usually is like:

1. I have started blogging
2. <something about Linux>
3. Why I moved this blog to Hugo

<months of nothing>

4. I now microblog
5. <some “micro” post about Linux>

<months of nothing>

6. Microblogging is just regular blogging
7. My thoughts on AI

Back in the day, personal websites where actually interesting because they were made by people with interesting topics, e.g. some Italian grandma sharing her tomato sauce recipes, or a huge page with nothing but Diablo 1 hacking by some student.

Nowadays it is 90% people who work in a 9-5 IT/software job, writing the same stuff as everyone else.

Man I hope so.

I’m skeptical, but I hope so.

Also sharing the concern that people are able to vibe code some crap and too many words in their writing as a cause rather than more positive changes.

Personal website may be becoming more popular but they will definitely not substitute facebook and instagram for 99% of internet users. If that’s what you’re hoping for the just forget about it.

As for AI, obviously we will not be able to use google to find the good personal websites. We will have to go back to webrings and ‘Links’ sections on our websites. It may be fun but it will definitely not solve any real issues.

For a while, the personal website looked like a leftover from an earlier Internet.

Looks at website Q.Q

On another note, namecheap stole my domain by not sending renewal notice and selling it to bidder who had offered previously.

Sounds like a lawsuit

Happens all the time, domain squatters buy expired domains all the time, they have some policies in place to prevent that, you can’t just register a domain the day it expires.

Namecheap has a 30 day renewal grace period, where they change your domain’s dns records to point to their page to let you know your domain expired. That means everything you use the domain for stops working for 30 days. If you renew at any point in those 30 days at the normal renewal price, everything goes back to normal.

If you don’t renew during the grace period, they may sell it in an auction lot of expired domains. If they did, you’re SOL, the domain has a new owner.

I’ve experienced this when a payment card failed auto renewal and my domain suddenly stopped working. If you don’t notice for 30 days, you’re not using the domain…

Did you have auto renewal on?

It seems like a good policy for the provider to remind about domain expiry, but really the administration burden is on you.

The preview image as well as the blogs logo are AI.

I sincerely hope, I dind’t just waste my time reading an AI generated blog post.

Also the text of the blog reads like heavily edited AI generated text, which is often done by AI “centrists”, as that is part of the whole “make it yours” mantra as pushed by AI vendors nowadays (leads to more AI interaction).

But where else can you find a real picture of a computer?

I’d love to do this but I’m totally tech illiterate

Start here: neocities.org

You don’t even need to use genAI slop for it. There were HTML editors in the good old days, even before all the bloated framework slop.

This guide will get you started with your own personal blog written purely in HTML+CSS (and a sprinkle of PHP if you like) in literally one long evening without ANY previous coding background whatsoever: htmlforpeople.com

And then you’ll be able to make your site any way you want.

As an absolute non-techie with a passion, can’t recommend it enough.

If it’s for blog posts and sharing some point across in writing, I found bearblog.dev to be great. It’s not completely “yours”, but it’s a great middle ground.

Cool thing about html is that even just writing a bunch of text and saving it as mypage.html is a valid website. Give it a shot and open it with your browser.

Then you can just go from there, one step at a time.

They never left, shithead