I would really like it if you had a personal website and I think it would make the world better

Who should create a personal website?

The internet of the 2000s, as I am told, was a landscape of individuality — creative, hand-crafted websites, blogrolls, and forums; hypertextual and organic. The internet of the 2020s, so it seems, is an algorithmic hellscape destroyed by Big Internet, a slop-filled rotting husk dotted by tiny oases struggling for breath among the waste. (I wrote this line as joking hyperbole at first but the more I think about it the less humorous it feels.) It's designed for the opposite of thoughtful engagement; designed not to connect, but to addict, to distract.

The internet is for everyone, though! You can at any moment wade out of the slop onto the land, and construct a little house. Then you can found or join a village and connect your little human places with little hypertext roads. This is the online world in which I hope to live: one with cities, of course (e.g. the social media giants) but also towns and villages.

I hope that you will make a website for yourself. I would enjoy seeing it, and I think it would make the world better.

Yes, the first step is the house! A little home on the internet. That's a personal website. There are sundry services that let you build kind-of-nice-looking websites (Wix or Squarespace or Wordpress or whatever) but I hope you'll consider something different: setting up a site yourself, with code and stuff!

There are a couple reasons you might consider building your own site:

• It's fun!
  • You get to learn things about how the web works
  • You get the satisfaction of having built everything yourself
• You have total creative control!
  • You have total control over what it looks like, what is on there, how it runs.

Note that there are a couple downsides though:

• You have total control; you have to set it up and learn how to write the code to make it run if you don't know how already
  • There's no doubt some technical overhead
• You have to pay a little bit for it
  • On the order of $10/year
• You have to maintain it

If you're intrigued, I have more details on a way I recommend setting up a website in Frontends, Backends, and Setup with Hugo.

You might come back and read the next section when you're done, but no pressure :)

What in the world do I put on this website?

So you now have a website — what do you put on it? My thought on this has been structured by a blog post by Henrik Karlsson, "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox". The title tells you essentially what you need to know — I think you should generalize that to the site as a whole.

There are lots of things that people use their sites for — sometimes a placeholder for their email address, sometimes a resume hosting site, sometimes a portfolio, if they're a designer; you can do all of that. But I think the personal site can be something deeper, if you'll let it. I'll quote from my current (as of July 2025) homepage:

This site is about me — my thoughts, my contact info, my own little simulacrum — but it's made for the both of us. The explicit overarching goal of this site is for it to signal various interests and preoccupations to you, in hopes that you'll reach out and we can talk about them.

My site is a place where I put things that I love, things that I want to talk about. I hope that people who love similar things and want to talk about similar things will see them, and they'll scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and use the contact info I leave there. Over time, the site becomes a representation of myself.

Now, here's a list of things that might stimulate you:

• Lists
  • blogs you like
  • quotes/selected passages from books you read
  • math problems you've enjoyed
  • books you like in general
  • playlists of music
  • book
  • starter pack
  • questions/problems you have
  • lists of people you like
• Personal
  • life updates
  • about page
  • starter pack
  • your resume
  • write-ups about your projects
  • discussions about places you've been
• Writing
  • book reviews
  • blog posts, to flesh out things that you're thinking about
  • technical posts; notes about things you have learned
• FAQs
  • things you wish you'd been asked