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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thinking-about-things.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.thinking-about-things.com</a>
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.<p>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 other factual sources if you keep digging.<p>Wikipedia having top spot is not always necessarily a bad thing because ultimately most people searching likely want a factual source - or at least a source they trust. However, as a result of the two algorithms (and no doubt many more) we have a bunch of "junk" links in between the top link and the other interesting links. Even Britannica ranks lower than the junk links.<p>What I mean by "junk" links is the "Top 10 Best Sumerian Gods", etc. These frequently contain content lifted from other sources - including each other, spam-like advertising, and simply prey on the search engine's algorithms to get on to the front page beating the interesting content down into pages 3,4,5 and beyond. There's entire sites devoted to "how to" game the search engines, as is to be expected with any automated system.<p>Yes, the algorithms could be better - Britannica and other factual sources shouldn't be below "Top 10" lists, but so could the ethics of those who run sites purely for advertising revenue.<p>Conversely, better results are shown on page 1 for "Elizabeth I".
Much of my personal blog is actually ranked on Google for terms. I tend to keep my notes in my blog, I share it on HN and Reddit.<p>It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge. My personal, unquantifiable goal, is saving a million man hours through my blog posts. So many things are implemented or explored, but never shared. Knowledge in a vacuum is useless to society.<p>I wish more people would do this (write and attempt to rank content), it’s what makes the internet revolutionary (not the memes or messages).
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.)<p>His site has the look of a personal webpage from 1997, but since retiring, he still works on articles and publishes them on his site. His site is a mix of scholarly articles (Anthropology), old syllabi, and personal stuff.
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.<p>My setup is (almost) free, mostly built on open components (so, no vendor lock in) and pretty low-latency. See if you'd like some inspiration on how to setup something similar for yourself: <a href="https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/posts/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-custom-domain-for-almost-free/" rel="nofollow">https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/posts/58-setup-blog-and-email-...</a>
There was a huge push for "new coders" to start their own blogs about problems they encounter and such, especially as part of the bootcamp that I was working for. I wonder if that is still a thing.
After reading that post, with the pink color background, and then hitting the back button to come back here. Hacker News looked quite green for a few seconds. It was an interesting experience.
I love this.<p>I love finding out-of-the-way personal websites.<p>A while back I did my own implementation of "lets make hard-to-discover things slightly more discoverable"<p>Every time you visit the website, you get a different personal website, as submitted by hacker news users a while back:<p><a href="https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com/</a>
I'm tangential to the indie comics scene and it's interesting seeing a personal (not portfolio) site revival in those circles in the last six months, particularly with NSFW artists getting booted from patreon/instagram/twitter. Being able to host your own works on a place that'll never be taken down according to whims of legislation is ... massively reassuring.<p>Set up a links page for a few of them, if anyone's curious in a personal site scene that's different from tech: <a href="http://www.kradeelav.com/link.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kradeelav.com/link.html</a>
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!<p><a href="https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-social-network-protocol/" rel="nofollow">https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so...</a><p>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.<p>Not everyone is gonna have your mad RSS skills. Other people have real lives and can barely digest what Twitter and Facebook feed them.<p>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).
Site seems to be down, archive link: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/personal-website-hunting.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://cheapskatesguide.org/ar...</a>
I found this huge list of personal blogs some time ago, it's a great source in case that's something you're looking for: <a href="https://blogs.sirodoht.com/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.sirodoht.com/</a><p>I don't know how sirodoht manages it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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.<p>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 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.<p>I suppose much of that is still alive today, though definitely yoked by the social media companies' stranglehold on content publication by the masses.
In Latin America we had geocities in the 90s which made it very easy for people to create their own website, then myspace arrived and as pointed out in article,the herd started moving out there.