Blogging

It all started with articles like Bring back personal blogging by Monique Judge for The Verge or the Bring Back Blogging project by Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam, who encouraged us all to get into the habit and publish at least three blog posts until the end of January 2023.

Get a domain name, something that is you. You can buy through web hosting services, from Cloudflare, Iwantmyname, Namecheap, or any of the other actors out there.

Choose a blogging platform. WordPress is the big one, open-source and all, so that’s probably the right choice for most of you. If you don’t want the hassle with web hosting and security updates, go with WordPress.com or any of the other managed solutions out there. It’s often free to start, but pointing your domain name (see 1) there is key, and that’ll probably cost you a bit. Other options are Ghost, Micro.blog, Blot, and so many more.

Use website directories. There are a few really helpful directories that list RSS feeds or personal sites and that can help you find interesting content. For example, Andy Bell’s personalsit.es, Dave Winer’s feedbase, the IndieWeb Directory, or RSS lists like the ones of Sime Vidas or Stuart Robson.

Use Webmentions and Microformats – and join the IndieWeb. Another powerful technology which can glue our sites together is Webmention. Webmention is a W3C recommendation that describes a simple protocol to notify any URL when a website links to it, and for web pages to request notifications when somebody links to them. The mentioned site can then grab a snippet of the HTML of the website that links to it and, if it is enriched with Microformats, display the mention somewhere, for example under a blog post like this one. Aside from all questions of data protection, Webmentions are a powerful tool and one of the many technologies that originated in the IndieWeb community. If you don’t know about the IndieWeb yet, take a look at my article on reclaiming control over your content, or head over to indieweb.org. Built around the basic idea that you should own your content, the IndieWeb community is the birthplace of a few powerful technologies that all have the goal to make your personal website the center of a more open, decentralized web.