I have a personal website. It's very easy to forget that 99% of people have no interest in making their own personal sites, never had, and never will. That's not a bad thing. Making your own site is a weird, niche thing to do -- a lot of work for no concrete reward.
In the past, the internet was dominated by people in that very strange 1%. The advent of social media didn't remove them, it just let everybody else in. The few that want to make their own sites still do, using platforms or tools that are far more convenient than a decade ago.
But it's still easier than it has ever been to create their own website. There are video tutorials with step by step instructions. People just don't want to. Which is okay, people are free to allocate their time to different interests.
I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a text editor and some photos.
Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account.
Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users.
You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML.
It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
I'm old enough that I had to hand-write all my web code when I started in the business, and I still do. Primarily because I never liked templates or wanted to learn how to tweak them - that's learning someone else's framework and being at their mercy. As it turns out, writing your own code is a lost skill and the companies and individuals who do need that service are willing to pay an arm and a leg for it. So I can charge $200/hr while someone building a template site might be making $15/hr. And my code isn't necessarily as flexible or future-proof. But it's built to do [insert specialized UI/data feature] that nothing on the open market does.
I really miss the efforts of early self-built websites, experiments, online games - even the really bad ones. I also think that having to jump through hoops to publish content made people think harder about what they were putting out in the world. Making the process of publication brainless lowers the bar of entry to, well, brainless people.
Completely agree. Way back in the day (late 90s) I decided to go hipster and hand-code my own static site in Notepad ("Suck it, Allaire HomeSite and HoTMeTaL!"), and put it up for all the world to see.
I didn't dig around too much into what would be needed - after all, I had taught myself HTML and relative paths! After a week of "Edit, Ctrl+S, Alt+Tab, F5, Repeat", I was finally happy with the (now shitty, then awesome) finished product. And then realised I had no clue how to get it up on any website, much less my own.
That was when I truly learnt how anything ought to be learnt (end-to-end). And also that I probably wasn't as smart as I thought :(
TL;DR: created website without knowing how websites really work.
Not having to learn Git to make a website, for one. Both my kids have a neocities website, github pages has an enormous barrier to entry compared to it.
Just google around, read some w3schools, type it into a textarea at neocities and woa, your own site.
Obviously this is only interesting for relatively nerdy types, but i don’t at all understand all the “why don’t people just <twenty cumbersome steps and tools>” comments that are here currently.
I know no place that makes having your own, self-built website, easier. And it’s free!
That's why I've set out to learn the trio of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to be able to build my own website/virtual apartment from scratch.
Learning C programming language will give me the foundation to get into development.
Learning linux sys admin in Debian and modifying my config files in XMonad window manager allows me to take back control of my computer. Once I master my computer I can help empower others to start doing the same! Great article btw
Your own website operated under a domain you control. It contains prose, images, and other useful information, created by yourself and available nowhere else.
Having written pages, by hand, for ages now (like 15 years or so), I recently took this to a new level. I'm now hosting my site on my own hand coded webserver and no other server in front (please don't make me explain).
1. Creating web-pages is like creating music, we should create tools that make it as easy as possible for anyone to create them
2. Creating web-pages is engineering, like building a house or a car. We don't want anyone without qualifications being able to create these, given their increasing complexity.
You gotta dance with the browser that brought you though. Unless you plan to never publish you’ve gotta design the best interface you can with the constraints of your real users.
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