On Personal Websites
Social media promised to democratize publishing. In practice, it centralized it. Your content lives on someone else's infrastructure, displayed according to someone else's algorithm, monetized for someone else's benefit.
Personal websites are a quiet form of resistance to this. Not a loud rejection of platforms—most people will maintain some presence there—but a claim to a space you actually control.
What Makes Them Different
A personal website isn't just a profile page with a custom domain. It's a space where:
- You set the constraints: Layout, typography, navigation—every choice is yours
- The algorithm is chronological: If you want to show something, you show it. No feed optimization required
- The format follows function: Want long essays? Photo grids? Project documentation? Build the structure that serves your needs
- Change is permissible: Redesign whenever it makes sense, not when a platform decides to refresh their UI
This isn't nostalgia for the 90s web (though there were good ideas there). It's an argument that personal websites serve a purpose platforms can't replicate.
Making It Sustainable
The reason many personal sites die isn't lack of interest—it's friction. If updating requires SSH-ing into a server and editing HTML, you won't do it.
Modern tools solve this. Static site generators, MDX, simple deployment pipelines—the technical barrier is lower than ever. The real work is deciding what you want to say and how you want to say it.
Some principles that help:
- Design for how you actually work (if you think in Markdown, build for Markdown)
- Remove steps between idea and published (fewer tools, fewer services, fewer dependencies)
- Make the site pleasant for you to look at (you'll be the primary visitor initially, and that's fine)
Why Bother
Platform content is optimized for engagement. Personal website content can optimize for anything: clarity, depth, aesthetics, exploration. The choice alone is valuable.
There's also something to be said for permanence. Platforms change, shut down, get acquired. A personal site, properly maintained, can outlast all of them. It's a long-term investment in having a stable home for your work.
Most importantly: it's yours. Not in the sense of ego or territory, but in the sense of genuine ownership. You decide what it is, what it becomes, and how it evolves.
In an increasingly homogenized web, that autonomy matters.