Sunday Selection 2024-08-11

I've spent most of the last couple weeks on Version 4 of this site. It's been live for about a week now, with lots of tinkering happening as I figure out how I actually want to use it and what I want to publish to it. A detailed post about the transition is in the works and coming soon (hopefully tomorrow). Till then, here are a couple of posts on building personal websites from around the web.

An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was liked to build this site from scratch

As the title probably gives away, this was a very entertaining read. Keennan talks about his growing dissatisfaction with his previous hosts, expressing sentiments that a lot of us might identify with. His blow-by-blow account of how he went from deciding to move away to actually going through all the steps of actually building his site (including frustrations along the way), makes for a good story of perseverance, struggle, and also asking and getting help from other people. If he can make the transition with very little prior knowledge of websites and programming, so can anyone else.

Don't forget you're making webpages

I have been known on occasion to wish that we could go back to a web that was mainly for sites and pages, rather than applications or services (and certainly not for advertising and filled AI slop). Like the author, I was pretty amazed when I figured out that I could write and publish my own webpages that other people could read, essentially for free (though I had that realization much later than the author did). Over the last few months, I've been rediscovering just how much joy it gives me to build and share web pages, and I hope it's something I'll keep doing for a long time ago.

Brutalist Web Design

If you do go down the route of building your own website, it doesn't have to be fancy, or a lot of work. In addition to sticking to standards as the previous post suggests, you can get a very functional website with very minimal design, and brutalist web design will tell you how. Personally, I'm not aiming to be brutalist, I do like beautiful fonts and fun colors, but my preferred minimal aesthetic does have a lot of overlap with a brutalist style.

My Failed Personal Site Redesign

And on a completely different note, you can also go a completely different route and build something with a lot of flair that chimes with your personality and taste. Even though Nielsen didn't go through with his hand-drawn website redesign, it's still an interesting experiment and he has some pointers to other people who do have fun visual elements.

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That's all folks! Hope you enjoy your (remaining) weekend and please come back to the read my rundown of Version 4 in a few days. Conveniently, you can now subscribe to an RSS feed to get future entries and posts delivered straight to your reader!