The preview image as well as the blogs logo are AI.
I sincerely hope, I dind’t just waste my time reading an AI generated blog post.
But where else can you find a real picture of a computer?
Also the text of the blog reads like heavily edited AI generated text, which is often done by AI “centrists”, as that is part of the whole “make it yours” mantra as pushed by AI vendors nowadays (leads to more AI interaction).
Anectdotally most of the personal blogs i stumble upon now are vibe coded and full of AI writing…
“That’s a great observation! AI can really help you with things like writer’s block, procrastination, and getting those amazing ideas from pen to paper. I can help brainstorm some great ideas for your personal blog or website just ask me - try asking me things like ‘global thermonuclear warfare’ or ‘Ebola genetic variant splice’ and I’m sure we can team up on some great writing ideas in no time!”
🤮
Did you prompt an LLM model for this text or did you come up with it on the spot? In case it’s the latter, you did a great job.
That is all me. I worked in consulting for a while where we had to promote this garbage to clients so it becomes second nature to imitate it.
On one hand, woah!
On the other hand, I’m sorry :(
Kick them out of the web ring.
For a while, the personal website looked like a leftover from an earlier Internet.
Looks at website Q.Q
On another note, namecheap stole my domain by not sending renewal notice and selling it to bidder who had offered previously.
Did you have auto renewal on?
It seems like a good policy for the provider to remind about domain expiry, but really the administration burden is on you.
Sounds like a lawsuit
Happens all the time, domain squatters buy expired domains all the time, they have some policies in place to prevent that, you can’t just register a domain the day it expires.
Namecheap has a 30 day renewal grace period, where they change your domain’s dns records to point to their page to let you know your domain expired. That means everything you use the domain for stops working for 30 days. If you renew at any point in those 30 days at the normal renewal price, everything goes back to normal.
If you don’t renew during the grace period, they may sell it in an auction lot of expired domains. If they did, you’re SOL, the domain has a new owner.
I’ve experienced this when a payment card failed auto renewal and my domain suddenly stopped working. If you don’t notice for 30 days, you’re not using the domain…
Mine never left, it’s been there all this time. </SmugMode>
How long have you had it?
I’ve had my current personal domain for 22 years, but before that I had a succession of hand-coded personal websites going back to the janky free webhosts we had in the 1990s.
Geocities old-timers unite!
I had a GeoCities account, but I got my start on Angelfire. I think.
Awesome stuff!
My website is older than YouTube lol
How do we find websites like yours? When I do a search it’s rare that small websites appear and Google seems to just end search results after a few pages. Is rss the primary way?
One way to find an individual’s personal website is to get it from them. Mine’s on my profile here, and has been on my profile everywhere on the Internet since time immemorial. It’s also in my email signature, and listed on my business cards and whatnot in real life. It’s established enough that you can also do web searches for my IRL name and probably find me, despite the fact that a famous English football player by the same name took the first page of Google results away from me at some point.
If you don’t know whose website you’re looking for, that makes it more difficult.
RTF from Cal’s forums? Izzat you?
👋😎
🌵?
Wild. I’ve definitely seen your personal website, then, although it’s been something like 20 years or so. Oh my, we’re old.
Who were you on Cal’s?
SilentNeep 😁
OMG HI!!
Ping me sometime, it’d be great to catch up.
Mine too. So old I have a 5 letter domain.
I’ve got 4. Ancient nerds unite!
Hah, for some reason when those were available I was registering crazy long ones. It was more about getting the words back then for me.
Honestly I’m surprised mine was still available since the 5 letter one (which is now my main personal domain/site) is actually my newest. It was around the time Popular Science rebranded PopSci, and I was able to grab NowSci.
Respect!
I have a URL that’s 30 years old this year and it’s still valid and it still redirects to my personal homepage.
(Bonus: The oldest Internet Archive snapshot of it is from 1997.)
How dare you claim that 1997 was 30 years ago… oh shit…
TIL the internet archive was launched in 1996
Not trying to one-up, but I registered daychilde.com in 1996. It’s actually on my to-do to redesign again as I leaned in a bit on the AI for art, although it’s a bit older than the 2025 the articles are from. heh. I’ll get there.
I think the next iteration will use 1600s fonts because I adore those - https://fonts.google.com/?query=im+fell
Join us…
Webrings still exist:
(It’s how we found new sites before search engines.)
To your parenthetical: not really. It was stuff like Gopher, Veronica and Archie.
Webrings were a thing that evolved alongside things like Altavista, before Google became dominant. They’re still a great option, given the current circumstances and low barrier to entry, though.
Time to dust off the ol’ GeoCities page, but I will keep the under construction gif.
GeoCities unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore, but there’s NeoCities now.
AI scrapping bots prevent me from making my own site. I want to learn how to poison the pages for these scrappers just like gamers nexus is doing. Sigh.
what are they scrapping? copper?
Makes me think of how people will write about the ‘dinning room’ :(
One of the shitty Mars movies from the early 2000s, Red Planet, has a line where one of the douche bags says to one of the nerdy types “so how many hits did you get on your website today” and it never fails to crack me up both because it dates the movie horribly and because it’s the jock saying it to the nerd.
I’d love to do this but I’m totally tech illiterate
Start here: https://neocities.org/
You don’t even need to use genAI slop for it. There were HTML editors in the good old days, even before all the bloated framework slop.
This guide will get you started with your own personal blog written purely in HTML+CSS (and a sprinkle of PHP if you like) in literally one long evening without ANY previous coding background whatsoever: https://htmlforpeople.com/
And then you’ll be able to make your site any way you want.
As an absolute non-techie with a passion, can’t recommend it enough.
If it’s for blog posts and sharing some point across in writing, I found https://bearblog.dev/ to be great. It’s not completely “yours”, but it’s a great middle ground.
Cool thing about html is that even just writing a bunch of text and saving it as mypage.html is a valid website. Give it a shot and open it with your browser.
Then you can just go from there, one step at a time.
What are you all using for your personal websites, is it just a simple HTML or flat file CMS? There are so many nice personal websites around but I wouldn’t be able to do that cause I’m stuck in the design-with-html-tables phase before CSS xD
I’d rather see your personal page with HTML tables than yet another CSS framework clone.
I just built one for myself with React (specifically wanted to learn the framework). And no other real UI libraries, so it’s effectively just HTML+CSS built with React components. I started off with some tables and then experimented with flexbox when I made it responsive for mobile. But I have it deployed as a basic static site so I think that precludes using a CMS or something like that (not sure I’m kind of a noob to web dev).
Anyway I think there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m pretty happy how it turned out. I don’t think you necessarily need some complicated stack especially for a simple personal site 👍
There’s an old saying: “If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.”
Tables still work and probably always will, whether they’re meant for layout or not.
CGI on the other hand, has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. If you need that, you’ll have to learn something new. Or find a very amenable host.
…
It is empowering to run your own things. I have been hosting my own services and sites since 2006.
If you had odd interests the best knowledge came from someone’s web page or (RIP) a Geocities page
Hell, the best resource on the internet for an aspiring bike mechanic is still… https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
Worth noting, some of his opinions may be out of date as he passed in 2008 but the things he wrote and shared are still super important. Dude taught me how to build wheels just 3 years ago
I started doing a radio show / podcast on an online station a couple of years ago. To start with I just put it on their site and Mixcloud and that was that.
But 18 months ago I had to part ways with them, so figured I’d probably just carry on doing it and putting it on Mixcloud. But I needed somewhere to stream live, so I had to put together a website.
Long story short; yeah, I now have my own website, with Owncast and Icecast subdomains and my show is available as a podcast that has an RSS feed.
As an added bonus, seeing as I already have a VPS, I’ve created a bunch of subdomains that I use to redirect some services that are hosted on my home server.
It’s fun.
88x31 LETS FUCKING GO!¡11111111
