Do you enjoy writing, or at least the idea of trying? I encourage you to create your own website and write for it. I’d like to read more of other people’s thinking.
A blog is an excellent start, although I’d like to see more personal sites where a blog is only one part. There are plenty of tools and platforms available, for blogs and for full websites, many completely free to use. The simplest free blogging tool I know of is bearblog.
If you are somewhat technically savvy, and inclined to build a site out of smaller pieces, I recommend using a static site generator (SSG). There are many good ones, cataloged here. I like Astro, and lately I am building with Starlight, their starter kit for documentation sites.
Like other SSGs, Astro takes my design files and turns them into a folder of vanilla HTML files, which can easily be hosted on the internet, often for free or very low cost. Among the free hosting services is Cloudflare Pages. There are several others (e.g. Github, Bitbucket) but I trust Cloudflare to continue to provide this service indefinitely — it fits their business model, and they have maintained a generous free plan for more than fifteen years now. This is important to me because I would like the website I create to live on; as far as I know, if I put my files there, Cloudflare will continue to host them long after I’m gone.
If you’re looking for a landing page or some sort of site without a blog then Carrd.com is a great option. It’s relatively cheap, easy to learn and (if you want) highly customizable.
I second Scout’s opinion. I’d like to read more of other people’s thinking too. After all, writing is thinking, in a sense. Grab a bearblog or pagecord or whatever and write. See if you like it.
Scout are you writing somewhere? I’d like to read your thinking too
Personally, I have two blogs, one on pagecord with is a single person development effort ( indie dev) and I really like the “send an email to post” feature. https://chadmoore.net if you’re curious. And then my other site is on ghost. https://playingwithcomplexity.com
CJ Chilvers had a post a while ago about a workshop and storefront. My pagecord is the workshop, where I tinker and think out loud. My ghost site is my storefront where I offer services.
That’s just one way to go, you don’t need two sites really. I just personally like the separation of concerns.
Thanks, take a look at my profile to find the site (including a blog!) that I’m currently working on. It’s a reboot I started recently, so there isn’t a lot of content there yet — but I’m working on it, steadily. Maybe worth a look in a few months.
I think we’re going to see a lot more vibe coded personal etc sites.
The bar I own here in Sydney uses Squarespace, and it costs $300 per year, plus $1,200 per year for booking software that takes payments etc. None of that makes sense, if you have the semi-technical capability to build your own stack.
Although I personally lack the time…
I’ve aged out of developing a useful opinion about vibe coding. But even I have become less of a curmudgeon about it.
I needed to do a small reformatting task on a set of text files, spent a little time trying to craft a regular expression for a search-and-replace, then lazily thought “I wonder if a chatbot could save me a few minutes here?” Claude took my very vague description, asked a few clarifying questions, then quickly spit out a Python script that looked fine and did the job perfectly. Maybe a bad thing if I wanted to get better at regexes, but I very much don’t, so thank you!
I’ve always been surprised that most business operators are reluctant to DIY more than they do — not completely, just more, it would not only save some money but give them a better sense of what expertise is actually worth buying and what is actually smoke and mirrors. Perhaps this will enable more of that?
On the other hand, many of those I worked with vastly overestimated their knowledge here. With one guy I developed a mantra: “Tell me what you want, not how to do it.” I worry that these would be the non-technical people most likely to vibe code a solution. And I hope that running up against stubborn facts will dissuade them before they do too much damage. Or maybe this will:
Warranty Void If Regenerated. Saw this on Hacker News, possibly relevant, a near-future short story about what things might be like once business people (farmers, in this case) start vibe coding tools for their operations. I have no idea how prescient it is, but the story is entertaining and parts of it ring very true.
I’ve moved from Carrd to Micro.blog, which beats out Bear Blog for me because it has native ActivityPub support, see IndieWeb and POSSE.
To build my static sites, I used Hugo via Claude Code. Despite my lack of modern coding knowledge, the process was brilliant. You can see the result here.
The experience was a total joy, sparking nostalgia for the old Dreamweaver days. There’s a funny irony in it: even though Claude did the heavy lifting, the design and aesthetic are entirely mine. It feels remarkably “analogue” and hand-built.
Very nice! Hugo is a lovely framework, I’ve built several sites with it. By hand, of course, but probably nothing I couldn’t have built with Claude in one-tenth the time.
Thanks for name-checking Dreamweaver! I used it to build sites for the first ten years. After static site generators came along I used them as a path to learn how to build using HTML/CSS/Javascript, and came to understand how junky the Dreamweaver-generated code was. But still! I never would have started building sites without DW, and even if the result was inferior to a hand-crafted site … well, it put site-building within my grasp, and produced sites that were more than adequate.
I sometimes think that vibe coding is a similar new thing, putting technical capabilities into the hands of creatives who don’t have the time or inclination to learn hand crafting.
I have lots of thoughts and feelings about creating web pages. But I have to write something fast otherwise I won’t have time. I’ve been busy the last few weeks. So, just for the record:
I use an Obsidian vault for my site.
I use Obsidian Publish to put it online.
I bought a fresh domain with Cloudflare because that’s what works with Obsidian Publish.
What works for me is the “garden” approach.
Some pages are done, some are just ideas. I can add to whichever topic I have something to say about.
Garden pages are not chronological.
Pages are only published if I tag them as “publish”
I also have a few folders that are sequential, more “blog like”.
Pages that are in my vault not marked as “publish” show up as dead links on the site if I reference them from a published page.
Oh dear. Down the rabbit hole I think I might go with your idea. I use Obsidian as my zettelkasten (only final notes get in, everything else is in IA Writer).
That looks a great way to build a site. Might just have to tinker. Thanks for sharing.
indie dev) and I really like the “send an email to post” feature.