I remember MySpace being described as "an easy personal website" back in high school.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts. About.me used to be great, but it didn't get maintained.
I'm working on a project to make personal websites as easy to set up as a social profile. No designs to pick - just a photo and profile photo. Not static - you have a mailing list and the latest post is shown on the homepage. And, people can "follow" with their emails.
Facebook used to be pitched as "the place everybody is", but that's no longer true - social networks are getting dis-aggregated. So, I expect personal sites to become a way for people to gain more control over their audiences, and to help move an audience from one platform to another (via a "link in bio" to their personal sites)
If you're interested in trying out my project for your own site:
I'd like to see a project like this which is self-hosted, where the process of buying a domain, acquiring hosting, etc. is made easy for non-technical users. The problem with sites like about.me is that eventually the maintainer gets acquired, gets bored, gets hit by a bus, etc. With a self-hosted site, it works as long as you keep paying Namecheap and AWS, for example. This arrangement also separates the core project owners from responsibility for whatever users slap on their page down the line.
I imagine users would go to one site (or app) to get it all running, and that site would hook them up with hosting and a domain name behind the scenes, maybe get them set up with a static page through a WYSIWYG editor, then boom done. Maybe give users a standalone app with their hosting keys and credentials that lets them update the content on their site directly (again through WYSIWYG, like Adobe Dreamwaver but easier), without going back to the initial setup site.
A platform or service that handholds users through initial setup and billing, and then steps away once they're up and running, seems to me like the right mix of centralized/devolved control and responsbility. I realize what I'm describing sounds a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure, easy-to-use package. I guess it depends on your choice of target audience.
Email sending is surprisingly hard to get right. That's where a lot of the value for a hosted product comes from.
With Postcard - I've had to add various checks and protections to prevent bot abuse (and to manage sender reputation). It would be really hard to be reactive like that on a self-hosted product.
Is it more or less the same problem as running a GNU Mailman listserv in 2022? That is to say, a fairly hard problem of staying on top of security patches, avoiding getting marked as spam, and avoiding getting put on the big email provider's badlists. In theory, the problem seems simple: replace a manually-managed BCC list with an alias to said list, so it's less hassle for the user/sender. Maybe the answer is an email client plug-in that just autofills BCC to-addresses? Assumption would be the user's sending this email from a known provider like GMail or Fastmail.
I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe you already do this.
Edit: I'm also assuming email is sent one-way to whoever signs up, maybe with a link to the dynamic chat server/app/platform of the moment. Slightly different from a GNU Mailman list, which enables back-and-forth conversation.
Yes, a little bit. I'm working on a different project that's more of a refreshed Google Groups / GNU Mailman listserv, and that has even more complexity for allow-lists: https://booklet.community
> I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe you already do this.
Yeah, that could be possible. I'm not opposed to releasing a self-hosted version of Postcard - but it's been useful to not have that constraint from the beginning. For instance, email sending happens in an async queue backed by Redis - and that might just be unnecessarily complex for a self-hosted tool!
> I'd like to see a project like this which is self-hosted, where the process of buying a domain, acquiring hosting, etc. is made easy for non-technical users. The problem with sites like about.me is that eventually the maintainer gets acquired, gets bored, gets hit by a bus, etc. With a self-hosted site, it works as long as you keep paying Namecheap and AWS, for example. This arrangement also separates the core project owners from responsibility for whatever users slap on their page down the line.
Right from the get go, long-term maintainability of such a platform is very hard, as there are now a few dependencies that you're reliant upon for your self-hosted site:
- Domain registrar
- Infrastructure provider (IaaS)
- DNS record management
Trying to make the providers swappable will be a challenge, as APIs are not consistent across the ecosystem. This is compounded when trying to make the solution turn-key, as now there needs to be a developmental effort behind the project to keep it up to date, & to add in new options to swap the providers out.
> I realize what I'm describing sounds a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure, easy-to-use package.
The pennies that can be picked up in this specific niche is too small to bother: The ones that just want a website without any frills will stick to WordPress & their providers, while those wanting extreme configurations & customizability will just run their own language/framework on the infra of their own choosing. The niche mentioned sits in between the two, with the extreme ends increasing their grasps: WordPress plugins from the easy end, and web frameworks from the other end (Vue, React, Svelte, Django, etc.).
**This kind of thinking, however, misses the forest in favor of nostalgia: The vast majority of modern Internet audiences want fast & easy discoverability/search, along with easy public sharing of posts, & account follows. Modern social media is what results from the inevitable result of catering to the market's demands. Such market wants also inevitably creates gravitational pulls towards platforms with large audiences, creating a feedback loop that's hard to break.**
Right now, there's a weak-but-present desire to decouple from Big Social Media (Mastadon, Lemmy, Friendica), but the wants of the modern audience run against the ideals of self-hosted social media taking off: Their customizability is their own Achilles Heel, with the technical & financial limitations of scaling self-hosted services making it near impossible to compete with the big guys.
For me, what social media has over a personal website is a common identity system and access control.
I would like to host my occasional posts and photos on my own site. But I don't want to post everything publically.
But requiring people to sign up to my personal website is probably unreasonable. And requiring a login implies a DB of some kind, which for me transforms it from fun into work.
I'm also not going to get excited about anything that isn't self-hosted. Sooner or later every cool startup either fails or becomes successful enough that their incentives no longer align with my interests.
If your audience could accept the basic look of it, basic auth + https will work. You can automate the creation of a new entry in the passwords file and the restart of the web server.
A compromise solution is publishing the post to your website, without having links to it from the public side, and sharing the URL only with your audience.
To be frank I don't trust my entire audience with a secret link. Someone will leak it and crawlers will find it. A link to a photo or two is fine but if they can then crawl everything it is too risky for the non-technical people in my life.
A personal website can still be as simple as dumping a single HTML file into your hosting provider's folder. Despite everything being built up in more complex ways, that hasn't changed since the beginning of the internet. In fact the lack of web style has seen a little bit of a resurgence.
Yeah, true - but I think the opportunity is a really tight integration with a mailing list. I think personal sites need some dynamic content - such as posts and a mailing list. Otherwise, they just feel stale.
That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far simpler, and built for people instead of marketing organizations.
If you use Sendfox, then all you have to do is drop your site’s RSS feed (auto-generated by WordPress, Ghost and other non-dev friendly solutions) in and it will automatically generate emails for you.
Best of all, Sendfox costs a tiny fraction of what ConvertKit does and it’s run by a more technical team.
What’s a decent static site generator for this sort of thing today? I’m envisioning a directory of .md’s or whatever, then I run make, and it invokes a thing that builds a tree of .html with an rss feed in it.
Why not build it yourself ? You'll probably spend more time tweaking template anyway. Plus, if you do it yourself you won't need anybody to maintain it.
I just use Gulp and PostHTML to render markdown, do some light templating. It does nothing more than put HTML files in a build folder. These tools never change so it's been pretty reliable.
I found myself forgetting how static site generators work, and barely used any features. I update my site like once a year.
Idk its in the JS ecosystem so HN will probably hate it lol.
That doesn't sound very boring. That sounds like it has several unnecessary moving parts. Makefiles (and the binaries they run to actually do all the heavy lifting) tend to be more fragile and less portable than their advocates let on. I often come across repos where I don't/can't trust the Makefile finish to completion without error, so I end up cracking it open to see what it's trying to do and then just running those commands manually.
People also inevitably end up forgetting how to use their static site generator setup. (Even in your "boring" example with "just" make, you will perhaps forget the templating language.) A ripe case fit for field study: <https://web.archive.org/web/20210331182731/https://corythebo...>
> So, time to update the website, but the first wall I hit was that I: ¶1. Forgot how my over-engineered SaaS was supposed to be used (no documentation because I built it myself and was lazy) ¶2. Forgot how to follow the esoteric Hugo conventions (has documentation, but it's not easy to parse at a glance)
> I was pretty annoyed with myself for having fallen for the trap of not documenting my own systems, but not sure how I could have remembered all of the Hugo-isms, especially since I don't update this site very often and don't do static site generator work outside of this.
If think you want to use a static site generator, first try just making your site capable of self-replication. Write a document that lists all the transformation steps that should be applied to the input in order to produce the desired output, save that as something like makesite.html, dump it somewhere on your site, and have it so that when you drag and drop the directory containing your site sources onto the page, then it spits the publishable version back out. (Just make it so that your makesite.html is written for a dumb enough audience that your computer (read: Web browser) can follow the steps on its own.)
Alternatively, don't use a static site generator. Adopt a regimen where the publishable representation (what would be the SSG's output) is also the canonical representation (i.e. "source").
"Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts." (italics are mine)
Huh? My definition of a personal website differs mightily from yours. Today, neocities.org and a day spent learning how to write simple HTML suffices. Fact is, I'm getting ready to do this once again myself. And I can email my friends (you know -- real friends) with a link. And I've found Google to be quite good at quickly adding my site to their databases. I can always find my sites using sensible search terms in Google.
A personal website should not look like a corporate website, or like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter (well, unless that's your obsession).
I find that a little HTML, the tiniest bit of CSS -- say 15-lines or less, some images/diagrams, and most importantly, something honest and interesting to say, is about all that's required.
The use of Pandoc can make writing HTML almost trivial, but then writing plain HTML is almost trivial anyway, even with Notepad. A personal website is not a place to track visitors, or to manipulate them with "Please Subscribe" membership assaults upon them. It's personal, it's right there in the name. By personal, I don't mean it's where you spill your guts about yourself (although, if you want, you can). It can even be a subtle ad, emphasis on subtle, for your work. Will the real John D. Cook, please stand up?
But why, in the name of all that's precious, does it have to be complicated? That's a rhetorical question, whose answer is, obviously, "It doesn't."
And about this dis-aggregated business, this "gain more control over their audiences..." stuff, that doesn't sound so personal to me.
I suspect many folks would gladly visit stale-looking sites that don't torment them with drop-down (and over) videos, and membership pleas 5-seconds after they begin reading the content they really came for. And on many sites, the absence of a comment section would be a blessing indeed -- the vitriol of the internet knows no bounds, and just being exposed to that stuff can sometimes send your mind down Negative Nellie Lane.
So to any non-technical readers who would like to create a simple site to say something they've been wanting to say to no one, someone, or everyone, I say give Neocities, or something similar a try. Wait a week, search Google for your site. Feel special. It's fun!
Hi Philip! I love the idea. I've thought about working on some similar project in the past, too.
Just a feature suggestion, can you please make it easy for people to setup RSS feeds?
Email-to-RSS solutions exist for technical people, but first party platform support for RSS will determine whether a significant minority of the nontechnical-but-literate internet (i.e. people who mostly consume and occasionally produce text) will adopt your service as a consumer.
Wordpress, for example, generates RSS feeds by default at a predictable url. Same with blogspot, hugo, ghost, and even substack.
My goal is that Postcard can get your site published in 2-3 minutes with nice design.
Wordpress isn't built for personal sites. Too many themes, too hard to set up, too much overhead. I think most people that want a personal site are not motivated to figure out the whole process of finding a template, designing the pages, configuring all the content sections, etc. Plus, Wordpress doesn't have an easy mailing list tool built-in.
> Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts.
There's nothing stopping personal sites from interacting with Fediverse standards. Then posting to your site is just a matter of inputing it as your home "server" in your preferred Fediverse app.
Wondering if Notion might not put you out of business. I have the impression they make it super easy to publish a "simple" page (could have a database) and edit it. Has seen a friend us Notion for that but haven't tried myself.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts. About.me used to be great, but it didn't get maintained.
I'm working on a project to make personal websites as easy to set up as a social profile. No designs to pick - just a photo and profile photo. Not static - you have a mailing list and the latest post is shown on the homepage. And, people can "follow" with their emails.
Facebook used to be pitched as "the place everybody is", but that's no longer true - social networks are getting dis-aggregated. So, I expect personal sites to become a way for people to gain more control over their audiences, and to help move an audience from one platform to another (via a "link in bio" to their personal sites)
If you're interested in trying out my project for your own site:
https://postcard.page
(Will trade free access for feedback!)