Welcome back to the blogging
If we have learned anything over the past few weeks/months/years, it’s that putting all your digital social/creative eggs into someone else’s basket is ultimately a bad idea.
While you may get “reach” with a lot less effort, you also end up with the possibility of being found somehow undesirable by a corporation and/or its oligarch. You may make some money, but you’ll definitely be enriching them. You may get readers, but at what cost?
So people who’ve been around the web block (so to speak) for a while, people I respect and who have done some of the work that made the once-great online public squares what they were, have begun to advocate for a return to the basics: your own website, maybe a blog, a return to RSS feeds and readers—basically, a decentralization of information ownership.
So, here I am. I began blogging a long time ago, first at Geocities, then at nerdslut.org1.
But now, older and wiser, and in need of a “personal brand” other than “confirmed bachelor”…well, the name’s the domain.
If you’re looking to get back to facing a blank screen and filling it with your creative self as well, or to start hanging out with the “rebels”, here are some resources to get you there:
Neocities: it’s like Geocities! But more! Get a free website, code your own HTML or use the many tools provided.
The Old Net: What it says on the label. It’s a fun assemblage of Web 1.0 sites and pages. See what you missed the first time around.
The Best RSS Readers (2024): RSS was awesome for people who read a lot. It’s still the standard for podcast discovery and publishing, but fell out of favor with sites. Let’s help bring it back.
NetNewsWire: My choice for RSS reader on Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Anil Dash has been online and writing about it since 1999. He is the voice of a better, kinder, smarter creative web. Cannot recommend reading him enough. Some of his greatest works hearken back to those good times when webrings, banner exchanges and image maps still had that new page smell: Moveable Type (RIP), as well as Glitch, where you can make things on the web, share them with people, remix and repeat.
Building a website like it’s 1999 in 2002: Fun page with some history, and how to do it DIY now.
(Turns out Angelfire and Tripod are still around…and so is their parent company, Lycos.)
For the Love of G-d, Make Your Own Website: Gita Jackson’s essay from November 2024 was a rallying cry for getting back to basics that you control.
“Building our own websites, making independent media, and striving for more democratic social networks—I think these are some of the small but crucial things we need to be doing to create alternatives to the monopolistic, billionaire-owned and increasingly authoritarian tech ecosystems currently dominating our lives,” Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, told me. “We still have to figure out how to triumph over extractive tech companies and curtail aggressively toxic social networks that encourage the spread of hateful messages, and to fund and elevate alternatives not in thrall to tech billionaires, but building working models is a necessary and urgent first step.”
As I find more sites/tools/writing, I’ll post them.
All this to say: glad to be here. Glad to be back. Looking forward to meeting you in the midst of (arms gesticulating around indicating everything going on around us.)
