A personal website in 2021?

When I joined the internet back in the days of dial up, everything seemed to be just a random website run by random people. You would stumble on to basic static html sites where someone had carefully and personally put together their notes on the different carnivorous plants for no reason other than they wanted to. Or finding the reverse engineered server protocols for MSN Messenger on a subpage of someones personal website (whom I still remember called themself, Zoronox). They would load slowly back then at a rate that I think would be unuseable today but I treasure the nostalgia of back then.

These days, the modern internet feels depleted of personal websites. Overtaken by centralised blogging websites or social media websites. All the tech posts seem aggregated to medium.com for example, taking advantage of the free hosting and the natural increased visibility through networking effects. It’s not bad but it’s different.

Recently I was in a bar with an old colleague who whipped out his personal website on his phone to show me his cross country skiing videos and archive of other youthful adventures he had had. It tracked back over 20 years and that sparked some joy in me. I looked around at some of my other peers and realised that actually lots of people still have their personal websites around and in use. Just not so visible these days on the modern internet but still loved and cared for very much by their owners.

So I decided now to add a spot on the internet for me.

Hopefully this is something more permanent than all the little websites I had back in the early 00s. I don’t really know what I’ll put here and for how long I’ll really make an effort adding content but I’ll enjoy the nostalgia hit as I dive back into the idea of having a personal website.