34
votes
Do you have a personal website/blog?
I've been thinking for a while about making my own little personal website/blog, and I was wondering what other people here on Tildes might have set up. I feel like having one could be a cool little way to get myself to write more often and hopefully improve my writing, especially when it comes to technical subjects.
I have a domain pointing to a VPS where I've got Ghost (open source blog software) set up with a few ancient posts. I'm thinking of re-doing it using Gatsby (a static site generator that uses React) because I want to make my site publishable as static files (so it can be accessible over IPFS), because I want to keep the history of all changes to it in a git repo, and because I want to be able to have individual posts and pages with interactive features powered by page-specific Javascript that uses React, npm libraries, and ES2015+ features.
I've been keeping notes in Google Keep with rough drafts of possible blog posts. I started a lot of my drafts by copying from posts I've made to Tildes, Reddit, and HN, and then re-working them to stand on their own. Looking at your own post history across various sites is the perfect way to find ideas for things you're able to write about.
I've also set up Fastmail on my domain. If you want email on your domain, I really recommend it. I highly recommend against trying to manage your own email server. It's a lot of work to get something working that works less well than free products, and you're never done with it. You'll always have to deal with spam, and worry that you might be silently missing emails, or that your sent emails are being silently dropped. You should put your effort into the things that you're uniquely good at, and not use up all your effort in just trying to duplicate what free or cheap services could get you unless you're learning something significant from it (If you're just looking for Linux/server experience, literally hosting anything else, like a webserver, will be a much better effort/reward ratio, and won't have bad failure modes like cutting you off from people trying to contact you), and/or bringing your own unique twist to it (There's no real unique twist you're going to be able to bring to running your own email server).
im on the same exact boat as you so you saved me some effort in typing.
I spun up a quick GitHub Pages site earlier today as an incentive to write a bit more. Don't know if it will actually happen, but I definitely intend to try to do what you said you want to do: post poems/short stories, technical stuff, analyses, etc.
I've got a notes file set up on my laptop for writing down ideas and bullets, and I installed a markdown editor to try to pretty those up and pull them out into, at the very least, blog length posts.
Yes, https://tilde.town/~notopygos - I write it manually using a text editor. also checkout tilde.town!
I only use git and lists service, it is pretty good. You can try it for free and start the subscription when you want to.
Yes! I have a personal website, https://alexguichet.com, which is my personal website and the hub for everything I do. I've also got a website that logs all the books I've read, books.alexguichet.com—it connects to the goodreads API to auto-update as I finish a new book. I'm also finishing up a creative portfolio site, probably another day or two of work until I call that done.
I've also got another site, called The Missing Quests, which is a blog that profiles small indie games from itch.io and other sources. I really like indie games, and on The Missing Quests I try to share new games that i've discovered. I find that it's important to bring a dose of positivity to the internet, and celebrate these cool creations from small undiscovered developers. (Sadly, I'm a little bit behind on posts because life has gotten in the way a bit, but I'm back on that grind this week.)
For a writing exercise, I've been making comics.
For 15+ years I've been doodling comics onto scratch pieces of paper at every job I've ever had, but it wasn't until a few years ago that I decided to start archiving them someplace online. For the longest time I'd felt that if I were to post them online that I should adhere to a schedule, and make sure that the jokes I cracked weren't so ridiculous that it'd alienate readers.
But then I watched some documentary about comic artists and I think it was Bill Watterson who said something I really needed to hear: as long as you make one person laugh, even if it's just your wife, it's a good comic. Ignore your audience, just do it for yourself. So I did.
I keep doodling my comics (admittedly putting in slightly more effort over time than I ever would had I not shared them), I post whenever I want, and I just ignore my audience/try not to cater to them. Over time it's become one of the few things I've ever created that've given me an actual sense of pride. And as silly as it sounds, I really hope that I inspire someone else who doodles comics onto scrap paper to share their work as well-- because I LOVE webcomics, and often find it's the less-polished, doodled comics that give me a good chuckle more than the polished, doing-it-for-a-living ones.
Keep up the good work!
I love your comics! You're definitely right about there being something special about the doodle-type comics. As @blake said, keep up the good work!
Yes! https://daviramos.com
It’s a minimally customized US$ 50 Wordpress theme. I didn’t want to dwell in actual webdev.
It only has one article. The idea was to post short stories, science fiction reviews and tech tutorials. Life got in the way. I hope to write more this semester. But I’m quite proud of my single post.
I own mysurname.com and use it to host all of my personal projects and a brief writeup of each of them, so kind of a blog. I also run my email on the same server with postfix so I can avoid at least some of the surveillance associated with popular hosting sites (e.g. GMail). Just having a server online has also come in handy a number of times, so I'd definitely recommend it, although your use case is somewhat different from mine.
That's definitely something I'd like to look into eventually. I'm currently mostly thinking about GitHub Pages and a static site generator, as getting a VPS or the like would be a bit difficult for me for a number of reasons.
How do you handle spam issues on your mail server? And how do you get the major mail services to accept mail you send? I've heard that Gmail and a number of the others tend to reject things from smaller providers as spam.
A VPS is definitely the way to go if you want to host email along with your website. You could use something like GSuite, but that costs more than a VPS capable of hosting that and a website, and I'd be wary of anything that markets itself as a free solution for that sort of thing. I also strongly recommend getting your own domain, since it'll appear more professional, although if your blog is purely personal that doesn't matter as much.
Spammers find addresses by crawling the web for strings that look like an email address. My personal email is listed only once online, and it's in the format "john at doe dot com" (as opposed to "john@doe.com"). Spamassassin takes care of whatever manages to recognize that format.
There are a bunch of little things you need to do to make sure everyone knows your server is secure. I used mail-tester.com to check for issues when I set up mine. If you get a 10/10 on that, rejection won't be a problem for you.
If you can't get a VPS though, you don't need to concern yourself with spam and rejection because whatever provider you use will take care of that for you. I'd be interested in knowing what actually prevents you from getting one, because the reason probably affects the other options available to you.
Thanks for answering my questions!
Just a more or less broke college student with no personal credit card. There's things I need to spend my money on more than a VPS. That can all wait until after I have real, substantial income in (hopefully) a few years.
Check out the tildeverse. You get a bit of web space, a community, and a shell :)
The best trick to hide your e-mail from spam bots is by using an image with your e-mail in it. Most, if not all spam bots, don't do OCR.
I have a dead simple setup: I have a little desktop here repurposed as (among other things) an nginx server. I write very rarely, so hand maintain an index and write in Markdown. I have a little template and use pandoc to generate HTML, which I manually copy to the server. No comments, no email, no bullshit.
I like it! Dead simple for sure. Don't always need enterprise-level scalable solutions for your personal blog.
Sort of? There's a layer between it and my personal life, but I run statsmash.
As to the technical details, the blog part is a static site generator served by nginx. The dynamic parts of it are a react app embedded in the static site generator with a flask REST endpoint on the same server.
Interesting. Did you build your own simple static generator? Or do you use something else behind the scenes?
It's a modified version of 11ty
Currently got a Ghost blog running on a server I bought to run various online services for me and my friends, both legal and not. But the site itself is just running on a simple docker container, didn't even take much customization to get it working. Have more trouble getting traefik to work properly than anything else.
The site itself is just a simple default Ghost Theme, though I'm not happy with it at all. I want to update it with custom css, but haven't looked into making custom Ghost Themes yet and I've just been a bit lazy recently. The default I'm using I feel is missing a bunch of features I really want, but at the same time has stuff I have no interest in at all.
The odd thing I didn't plan to actually use the site, I bought the domain for other reasons. And the site was originally just going to be a static webpage I could use for posting updates about services I run to my friends easily. Somewhere along the way I figured since I was going through this effort, I might as well turn it into a functional site. It also gave me a great excuse to get back into writing reviews about various things I'm reading and watching. Here is the site if anybody is interested.
I have my personal website/blog on https://www.gkayaalp.com/. It is a whatever-goes blog plus a few web pages, and the index.html is like a little business card.
It's built using a custom, half baked Ruby SSG. Search uses DuckDuckGo, which is surprisingly good for an obscure little website. I currently host it on GitLab Pages, but I intend to move back to NFS.net or something similar.
Has it been useful for me? Yes, definitely. The one and only time I got a job as a Django dev as a self-taught script kiddie, it was my blog and Github that impressed the lead dev there. Also, some interesting e-mails in response to my posts. One of which was from a guy who read this and suggested I take the academic path that he took. I researched the area and was almost deciding to switch to it last summer; it almost changed the entire path of my life.
I really suggest everyone to try your hand at it. Even if not a blog, just put up something like my homepage: your name, a little bio, a few links to stuff you do. That was what I started with, the blog part came later.
Thanks for the advice! That's super interesting. I honestly really love the look of your site: it's a lot different from the sleek setups you see in a lot of places, but it's still super functional and passes the necessary information along.
Thanks a lot and you're welcome! It took some time to get here, but I really like the aesthetics and pragmatics of my website TBH. It is simple, looks identical in text-based browsers, doesn't use JS, and should work well with all the accessibility tools out there because it is plain and semantic HTML. It was initially inspired by msmtp and mpop developer's website, which was way smaller a couple years ago (BTW msmtp and mpop are my SMTP and POP3 clients of choice, really nice software).
I got very into self hosting some time last year, and around the same time my family members started asking that I write down some of the information that came up around tech/privacy/security when we all got together. So I started a blog, https://tfhe.shanemoore.me, which is more or less a collection of essays directed at my cousins and other family members about what privacy means on the internet, why it's important and what we can do to protect it. It's still only got a few posts (I'm working on a new one now), but I really enjoy having an opportunity to collect my thoughts and cite my arguments a bit more than I normally do.
The site itself is just a flask app running behind the same caddy reverse proxy that I run all of my self-hosted stuff on, running on my nuc in my basement. I recently open-sourced the skeleton here: https://gitlab.com/smoores/pliant in case anyone else is interested. That was also kind of fun, just working through some of the design choices I'd made. Very happy to chat about this stuff with whoever's interested, and it seems like a lot of people here are interested!
A blog with family-directed privacy and security content sounds like a really great idea, I love it. My fiancee just bought a new laptop and yesterday she said, "You'll be proud of me. I installed Firefox," and I was! But it took a long time to get there, and any other privacy concerns have been dismissed. I haven't even really brought it up with my family. But maybe some blog posts would be a good way to talk to them about it.
Thanks! It's definitely an uphill battle. It helps that in my case, my cousins at least were already at least somewhat open to the idea, and actually asked me to start writing stuff down for them. That said, I think writing can sometimes be more powerful than verbal conversation, and it's a fun challenge to write for an audience with varying levels of background knowledge and interest in something as complex as digital privacy.
Yes! This is what I want to do it for. Thanks again for the idea!
I don't, but for those who do: have you got any reactions to what you write or does it feel like you're peeing into the wind? Genuinely curious, not joking.
Good question.
15 years ago, when I started, I didn’t care. I was in high school and it seemed just like the thing to do. Back then it was very much just a public diary.
A few years after that, I started looking at statistics and actually cared how many visitors I got.
A few years after that, I realised most of those were spiders or spam bots, and ultimately I didn’t care what’s popular or not. If an article I wrote was useful or interesting to at least one reader out there, it was already worth publishing. If it was just as a public reminder to me (e.g. lists of my favourite DE blades and favourite shaving oils), that’s just as fine.
The following two posts I know were the most read when they were published (tens of thousands of times), as I still looked at the numbers:
I also suspect the following post, or at least its contents, reached many people (potentially even more as the above ones, as it was often cited in Android forums), but by then I stopped looking at stats, so I have no data to back this up:
Regarding feedback, I really liked the comments and further discussing stuff in the comment section …back then, when there was less spam than comments :P Nowaday, I sometimes get feedback via e-mail or Slack or IRC (or here).
Hey, that rooting/warranty link came at the perfect time, nice.
Glad it proved useful 😀
I started writing just for me, but recently I've been cross-posting to Mastodon and have been getting a lot of good feedback on stuff. So for a while, I felt like I was peeing into the wind (love that turn of phrase, by the way!), but as of late it's been really good and actually validating, even though I'm not getting like 500030 page views.
That's encouraging, thanks.
Personally, I write specifically for my cousins and their SOs (audience of about 6). It helps both to direct the framing of my writing, and because they tend to be pretty inclined to give feedback and start conversations, since they know that it's directed at them. I don't know if this is something other people do as well, but it's been very helpful for me!
That's an idea. Perhaps I'll start something similar on school's Intranet, test the waters there.
I have a tiny blog about tabletop RPG stuff that I host on a VPS. I write my own html and css, and just use rsync to push changes. I haven't updated it in ages, but learning how to get it all working was a great experience.
Yes! I have a personal website at https://www.acdw.net that I mostly post creative writing stuff on. Sometimes (not so much any more, but I want to get back to it) I'll do a recipe, or I really want to start doing info pages about the dogs I foster.
I also use the site to set myself little challenges, like I'm currently doing one where I write something with a random AI-generated title every day for a year, and another where I'm listening and writing about all of Mozart's compositions in order. It's a fun diversion.
I'm a little worried about what might happen if I ever am able to make money from my writing and need to have a "clean" web presence for marketing purposes, but I remind myself that I'm not submitting anything anywhere and I can cross that bridge when I get to it.
I'm really excited to read all the websites in this thread when I get up tomorrow! I was scrolling through my phone about to go to bed when I saw this and it made me get up and come in here and type up this response. Great topic!
Hey, I really like the new looks of your website!
Thank you!
Gotta agree with @cadadr about your site, it's beautiful. I love your writing, too. Thanks for sharing!
Hey thanks! That feels really good to hear :)
How do you build your site? Do you use a static site generator of some type? Or do you do everything by hand with the help of
pandocor something?I use Hakyll, which uses Pandoc under the hood. Hakyll is more like a library that you can write a custom static site generator in (though it's way easier than that makes it sound!). My setup is located at sourcehut, if you're interested in looking at it.
That's really interesting. A ton different from Jekyll, Pelican, and friends on the "you give me content and templates, I spit out a thing" side. I'll definitely take a look.
Yeah, it's much more "build your own" than those. I went with it because I wanted to do some weird things (mostly use how many days I've been alive as the folder posts are in, instead of YYYY/mm/dd/post-name) that the others wouldn't let me. I'm also a bit of a masochist so I do things the hard way.
Mad respect for being sufficiently dedicated to a goal like that to use something off the beaten path. Did you already know Haskell when you started using it or did you learn as you went along?
I sort of knew Haskell; I've used Xmonad before (which I think Hakyll got some inspiration from; it's like a window manager library thing), and read "Learn you a Haskell for great good!" and a few other tutorials as well. But one of the cool things about Hakyll is that it is accessible to new learners, that is, if you're not that comfortable with Haskell at first, you can customize the
site.hsalmost as a plain config file, then start plugging in more extreme stuff later.When I was still considering grad school as an option, I maintained a personal site for writings, bio, rep list, etc. Now that I'm not pursuing that path anymore I've been considering starting it back up, just as kind of another internet presence.
To your point, it didn't really make me write more, but it also wasn't a "blog" so much as a "quasi-professional landing page that isn't linkedin."
I recently set up a personal blog. It was to achieve a handful of goals:
Writing every day is a huge commitment, and I very quickly found that whilst I had the motivation to do it, I just didn't have the content to justify it. I've modified my third goal to be writing about interesting things I've watched, read, or done.
www.frankforce.com
I really like wordpress! I've been using it for 10 years and only made a few minor changes to the theme using the built in "Additonal CSS" feature.
I also added a sidebar for my recent tweets, and a sidebar showing recent commits to my game engine project.
Currently I use Pelican, because maintaining static HTML is super-easy and writing posts in MarkDown is intuitive enough. What I mean with maintenance here is:
I wrote a bit more about on my blog in the post that discusses the technical history of my blog and how the final migration to a static HTML generator came to be.
In the end, self-hosting might sound scary, but as long as you use a static HTML generator, it’s really not.
For my blog, I decided that comments are not really needed, even if they are on (very) rare occasions (very) useful. I am looking at WebMentions as a possible replacement for comments, but don’t have much experience with them yet. It looks like it might just pull up together all comments and mentions on a certain post from all over the web, which means that below the blog post you could still have the comment section, but it would be aggregated from different sources (regardless of Twitter, Reddit, StackOverflow, Tildes, several forums etc.). Really cool, if it catches on, esp. as it’s proposed as a W3C standard. And if you really need (hint: you probably don’t) comments, you can either embed the comments from an already existing platform (e.g. Tildes, StatusNet, Mastodon, HN, Reddit, …), or host your own commenting platform such as Isso. The up-side of hosting a separate comment system to the content system, is that you can run it separately, so it does not affect your actual blog/content directly.
I think structure is a really important part of a blog, and this is how I structure mine (after 15 years of tweaking:
As for content and privacy questions: I self-host, so I can put on it whatever I want, no limits. And the same goes for privacy :)
This post has borrowed heavily from a previous post I made in the _What is the blogging platform of your dreams thread
I really like your category structure! It makes me think I should rejigger mine...
Thanks, took me a long time to get to that. There were so many revisions during the years.
BTW, I like how the choice of your theme matches the content of your blog. They seem to be in the same vibe.
Thank you! I thought a lot about it, too.
Funny that this topic should come up right now. I've just started setting my personal site up: https://blakes.email
It'll mostly host my contact info, and a few blog type posts every once in a while. It's still very much in progress.
It's hosted at nearlyfreespeech.net and uses the free version of Cloudflare. It costs me less than $4/year to run.
Everything is static, I'm not one for fancy stuff. Also I'm not a web dev so all I know how to do is copy/paste HTML and figure out how to make it work.
I like the .email TLD, I think it's a fun and easy way to give people your contact info.
Nice little setup; I like it :)
I blog at http://dblohm7.ca. It's just static content generated via Octopress and served up by github pages.
I have fooled around with many different free sites in the past, and helped various people build sites for their domains in the past, but never doubled down on anything I would consider worth buying space/domain for.
Back when blogs were the hip cool thing I ran a successful blog for the niche sport of skimboarding called "Sooo Pitted". It gained an unreasonable amount of attention just because of the resurgence of the sport then as well as the appetite for blog media at the time.
Unfortunately, for some reason, I guess in my angsty young phase, I deleted the site and practically none of it is preserved save as screen or 2 on WayBack. Kinda unfortunate because there is literally one singular post I would have saved from the blog if I could, an interview with an epic personality in the sport. It was really really good compared to the rest of the content I released. Anyway
I considered a V2 but it is quite clear now, blogs are dead. Social media is king. So I made this and never touched it again: https://theskimboardingblog.wordpress.com/
I really do miss when somebody could start a simple project and not have to be a charismatic click baiter... It's rare to find people like "Primitive Technology" who truly hold their own on content alone. No personality, no exaggeration, just honest quality content.
I do have a personal website, but I really don't have anything to write, so I just let it sit there with 4 (mostly useless) posts. Maybe I'll turn it into some kind of "homepage", but not sure on what to do yet.
I also have a site where I write programming tutorials, but that's entirely in Turkish so I won't bother you guys with it.
I do, and I'm trying to self-manage it which so far isn't going too well (about 0 experience in back/frontend as well as 0 experience in linux) but it runs a static wiki page, so there's that. Took a lot of blood and sweat to get that going + the WYSIWYG plugin I wanted to add doesn't work and I have no idea how to fix it, but alas.
It also doesn't have a domain name yet, but since it's a passworded personal thing for now it doesn't really matter anyway.
The idea was to compile knowledge in a wiki I can access from anywhere, as some sort of branched notebook that never gets lost and is easy to search and navigate. That system works, just haven't really got the time yet to fill it with content.
Other than the wiki there's not really any pages yet; still need to put some framework in that's both easy to set up and highly configurable (and free), since I somehow found WordPress too cluttered/confusing to work with. That was probably not the best choice, but I'm not going back :>
In any case, if anyone has any experience with running MediaWiki on CentOS and getting plugins to work, please let me know if you want to help.
I run a Hugo blog hosted on github pages for putting the terrible home-brew stuff I write for RPGs sometimes. I haven't updated it in a while but the domain costs me like $12/year and the actual hosting is free so I'm happy to just let it sit.
I've got a website under my real name that just links to my resume, github, and linkedin. The idea of having a blog intrigues me but I don't know what I'd write. I don't feel like I have anything worth saying
I've hosted various things over the years but I just can't be bothered fiddling about with much in the way of hosted stuff any more. I use blogger because it's free and easy.
http://blog.shinium.eu/
That said I do have a business site on my own Linode instance. I could put the blog on there but eeeehhhhh.