I keep finding good websites again

A few months ago I started a text file called sites.txt. Nothing organised about it, just a URL per line and sometimes a word about why I kept it. It’s at sixty-one entries now.

Almost none of them are on a platform. There’s a man in Utrecht who writes about bridges. Someone’s twelve-year log of every bird seen out of one kitchen window, with counts. A woodworker who posts once a month, bad photos, very good writing. A retired air traffic controller taking apart old incidents in a level of detail no publication would ever pay for.

I wasn’t collecting personal sites on purpose. That’s just what the file filled up with.

This gets announced every eighteen months

I should say up front that people have been calling the return of the personal website since about 2010, and have been wrong nearly every time. RSS is back. Blogs are back. The indie web is back. Usually it isn’t.

So take what follows with some salt. Something does feel different to me, but the reasons are less romantic than the usual version of this argument.

Search stopped doing the job

The practical change is that search stopped surfacing this kind of thing, so I started finding it other ways. Links from other small sites, a couple of aggregators, people sending me stuff directly.

That’s mostly a downgrade and I’d rather have working search. But it does mean anything I find now arrives with a recommendation attached, which turns out to be a better filter than a ranking algorithm losing an arms race with the SEO industry.

The economics broke first

For a long time the deal was reasonable. You put your work on a platform and the platform gave you reach.

What broke wasn’t the idea, it was the arithmetic. Reach became something you rent. Publishers hit the same wall at a much larger scale and a few of them nearly died of it. If half your traffic comes from one referrer, you don’t have an audience, you have an arrangement, and the other party can change it on a Tuesday.

Running your own site doesn’t fix any of that. It just makes the number honest.

Building one got easy, which nobody mentions

Here’s the part I don’t see written about much. Making a decent website is significantly less work than it was in 2012.

A lot of that is just the browser catching up. clamp() scales type from a phone to a monitor in one line. Grid does layouts that used to need a library. prefers-color-scheme turns dark mode into a media query instead of a feature. loading="lazy" replaced most of what image plugins existed for. None of it needs a build step or a framework.

This site is the demonstration. Markdown files go through a Python script, the script writes HTML, nginx serves the HTML:

content/posts/*.md   →   build.py   →   dist/**.html   →   nginx

No database, no framework, nothing running per request. The only JavaScript on the page is about fifteen lines that remember whether you picked dark mode. It’s a few hundred lines of CSS and one Python file I’ll still be able to read in six months, which is the real test.

If half your traffic comes from one referrer, you don’t have an audience, you have an arrangement.

The thing I actually care about

I lost a few years of writing once. Nothing dramatic. A service announced it was shutting down, I told myself I’d export everything, I didn’t, and the export tool broke before the domain did. I still remember two or three of those posts and I’d like to read them again and I can’t.

Everything I’ve put on my own domain since 2015 is still sitting at the same address. That isn’t an achievement, it’s just what happens when nobody else is in charge of the URL. You don’t really notice it as a feature until you’ve lost it once.

What it’s bad at

Worth saying, because posts like this tend to oversell. One person with a static site is not going to run an investigations desk, or cover an election night, or fight a libel case. That takes a newsroom, newsrooms cost money, and a lot of that money currently comes from exactly the ad machinery I’d rather not have on my own pages. I don’t have a clean answer to that and I’m suspicious of people who do.

Small sites are good at something narrower. One person, one subject, no deadline, and enough room to get it right.

If you want one

The technical barrier isn’t the barrier. Buy a domain, put files on a server. A few things I’d tell myself if I were starting over:

• Pick a URL shape you can live with for ten years, then leave it alone. /posts/slug/ is fine. Anything with a date in the path you’ll eventually regret.
• Write for the version of you from before you knew the subject.
• Ship it unfinished. Everything on the small web is slightly unfinished. That’s most of the charm.

Sixty-one entries. I’ll probably still be adding to that file next year.

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This is sample content, here to show off the layout and typography. The pictures are generated placeholders — drop real ones in static/img/ and point the front matter at them.