• small-web

Make your own Personal Hub

Published on November 13th, 2024, 669 words, 3 minutes to read

This is not your run-of-the-mill article on making your personal website. Well, it kind of is, but its point is not that you have to build one. Programming is complicated and takes its time after all.

So, what exactly do I mean with Personal Hub then?

Well, where is your internet identity housed? If you mainly use social media, it's probably one of the mainstay platforms, like Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, whatever. That's where people can find you and info about you. And in general, that's not a problem.

Currently, however, with all the moving away from Twitter the "housing" is becoming unclear. Of course, you can move to another platform and make it your home, but what guarantees that the new platform will stay around either?

At some point, people will lose track. And re-establishing your "person" on a new site becomes a repeating task.

You can post about yourself each and every time, but you have to treat posts on social media as ephemeral. People will follow you because of something they shared at a certain point, and they will stay for what you post after that. The stuff you posted previously is not relevant to most people (unless you are maybe an artist).

That's where a website comes into play. A space about yourself that you can put relevant information on, and at best, not just a link to other places you are on. So you are shifting the "center of your personality" away from a social media site to your own.

Aside from the benefit of having a space for permanent information about you, a website can also grow with your personal needs. Want to rant about something longer? Add a page on your site for that. Do you start doing it more often? Turn it into a blog.

You don't need to have everything figured out at the very beginning of a website. It can start with a simple paragraph about yourself and some links, and it can end up as your own library. A personal website is never truly final.

Okay, but why don't I call this blog post "Make your own Website" instead? People think about this in the sense of hosting, coding, and everything technical, and this is not what it has to be.

I'm not going to start off with just "link collection sites", so we skip those.

As a starter, you could get yourself a Carrd. It's really simple and there's a lot of stuff you can put on a single page. People are building the wildest templates to create a multi-page feeling as well.

Or, are you already using Notion? If you are already used to the workflow of organizing your things, you can pretty much build your own basic website and publish it.

Remember Geocities? In the early days of the internet (up until its closure in 2009) this was a space where people were able to build and publish their own websites for free. Following in its footsteps now is Neocities, offering the same flexibility in a more modern package.

I also became aware of Bear, a simple blogging platform that became the home to many users after Cohost shut down. The landing page does not show off too much about it, so as an example, here's the site of my friend Damien.

If it wasn't for the total meltdown of the WordPress founder, this would be where I'd recommend wordpress.com for starter website needs, but I'll refrain from that for now.

If your website requirements grow, it might be time to build your own website, but by then you will probably have amassed the skills to do so from tinkering with the tools you had available until then.

It's time to take the web back into our hands and make our marks on it again!