Hi All! 🤗

And then, one cold evening in December, my car broke down. In the middle of the intersection, right when the traffic lights turned green and I was about to leave. The engine, which had been turned off by the start-stop system, suddenly wouldn’t start again. Each turn of the key was met with a miserable grinding noise, each attempt more desperate than the last. The starter battery was dead, unable to provide the spark for the engine to start again.

Writing – whether it is on your personal site or a newsletter – can feel just like that sometimes. The longer we haven’t published something, the more we feel stuck in the middle of nowhere. The creative spark feels dead, the battery of inspiration and ideas drained.

But just like with a car that won't start, the solution isn’t to wait for a miracle or until you’re “ready”. You need to take action. In the case of my car, I needed help in the form of the ADAC, the German automobile club, and a set of jumper cables. On your blog, a writing prompt, a list of topics you could write about, or maybe even a few words of encouragement from someone else can provide that first creative spark to get moving again. And then, all you need is a little push – sit down and write that one first sentence, that first paragraph, that first little thought. And before you know it, the words start flowing and you’re in motion again. The road opens up before you, and you’re wondering why you spent so much time waiting on the side of the road.

Hi All! 🤗

For the summer holidays, my family and I went to France. On our way to the Atlantic Ocean, we shortly stopped in Chartres, a lovely town southwest of Paris, which is famous for its monumental and impressively beautiful cathedral. On the way back, we visited Paris and climbed up the stairs (well done, kids!) of one of the world’s most famous monuments: the Eiffel Tower.

Although built in entirely different eras and over radically different time periods, both buildings leave you thunderstruck by the architectural ingenuity, aesthetic mastery, and visionary boldness that went into their creation. But the two masterpieces also share another interesting similarity: they are both constantly under construction.

Notre-Dame de Chartres was originally built in the 13th century. Over time, new parts were added to the Gothic structure of the cathedral, while other parts – like the entire roof or the north spire, for example – got destroyed by fire and had to be reconstructed and rebuilt. And as is the case with all historical monuments, the ravages of time also demand that things like the facade or the infamous stained glass windows are constantly being repaired and restored.

Hi All! 🤗

Let’s talk about the first thing many of your visitors will see and thus one of the most important places on any personal website: the home page. “The home” is where you leave a first impression and where people decide whether the website they are looking at – and the services you might be offering – are worth their time. But it is also where you set the tone for the entire time people will spend on your site.

Maybe that’s also the reason why, for a lot of people, the home is one of the hardest pages to get right. What should you put on your home page in the first place? And should the information be short and concise because nobody has time anyway these days? Or should it include basically everything about you and provide as much information as possible within a few scrolls? As always, there is no single right answer here. The perfect home page doesn’t exist and what you include depends on what you want to achieve.

You could, for example, start with the basics: visitors of your site should probably learn the most important things about you quite quickly. This can include things like your name, your job title, your skills, the things you do, or the services you offer. Again, what you add here is completely up to you. But putting on the hat of your visitors and thinking about what it is they might want to know about you is a good exercise to start with.

Hi All! 🤗

Imagine, just for a second, a future in which we all have our own websites and that those sites are at the center of everything we do and create online. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to collect reactions from other personal websites or large platforms when we publish something on our own sites? And wouldn’t it be exciting if we could actually enable decentralized conversations across our websites, by letting our sites talk to each other?

Well, there is a way to that today: Webmentions.

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Hi All! 🤗

There are many pages you can add to your personal site that people can visit if they want to learn more about you. A “contact” page or an “about” page are two classics that you’ll find on many sites out there. But what if someone doesn’t want to read your bio, your scope of activities, or a list of your accolades? What if that person would rather like to know what you are doing and thinking about right now? What if they would love to read about what excites you like nothing else and where your priorities lie at this very moment? Did you just start working on a fascinating new project? Did you move to a new town? Or are you trying to learn how to juggle or play the mandolin?

Almost nine years ago, musician, speaker, entrepreneur, author, and former circus clown Derek Sivers asked himself this exact same question and came up with an answer: he added a page to his website that contained information about what he was doing right now. He published the page under the URL path /now and called it his “now page”.

As it turned out, people really liked that idea! Within just a few weeks, more and more people started adding /now pages to their own personal websites. Over time, the idea gained so much momentum that one could confidently call it a movement and it warranted its own website showcasing all the /now pages people from all around the world were adding to their sites. This website, nownownow.com, now has well over 2300 entries.

Hi All! 🤗

It is one of the most common reasons why we abandon our personal sites and blogs: at some point, we stop publishing.

But why? Weren’t we so enthusiastic when we started (or restarted) our sites? Didn’t we tell ourselves that this time, we would really post more regularly? And didn’t it also work well for a few posts? But then, everyday life interfered. Other things needed our attention. And before we knew it, two months had passed since our last post. Then four, then eight… And, just like with other habits, once you let the series break and more and more time has passed since your last post, it is getting even harder to publish again.

You would be right in pointing out that that’s part of the beauty of having a personal site. You are free to decide how regularly you post and there is no obligation to post anything. You don’t owe the world or the people out there any posts, after all.

Hi All! 🤗

Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Or imagine that a site you poured all your thoughts and writing into decides overnight that it might be a good idea to sell access to all user data to a company that is training their large language model with it. And again, there is nothing you can do about it.

Hi All! 🤗

Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many different ways to do this.

First of all, you could save your bookmarks in your browser. While there is generally nothing wrong about that and I know many people for whom this solution works well, it can still be a bit cumbersome to organize your bookmarks this way, especially if you want to also add tags or notes. You could also save your favorites in a read-it-later app like Pocket or Omnivore. Or, you could save and manage your favorite links with bookmarking services like Raindrop, Pinboard, or the open-source tool LinkAce.

But all those solutions are missing an important bit: the social aspect of bookmarking, also known as sharing links with others. Once upon a system time, sites like Zootool, StumbleUpon, or Delicious not only let us save bookmarks, but also made it possible to discover new, interesting links that others had saved. This social aspect, this way of curating and sharing a collection of links that others can follow, has become a lost art.

Hi All! 🤗

In the last issue, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a personal website should do: adding an RSS feed.

What’s RSS?

RSS, which stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or also “RDF Site Summary” or “Rich Site Summary”, is a way to distribute the content of your site through a feed that people can subscribe to. Basically, you provide a feed of your website’s content that gets updated every time you publish something new. People can subscribe to that feed – and the feeds of other websites – and then read all updates in their feed reader of choice, all in one place. This way, readers don’t have to repeatedly visit various websites and other sources of interest to look if new posts have been published, but can instead pull in all new posts automatically. For you as a publisher, this also has the huge advantage that people who enjoy reading your posts will automatically get to see them once their feed reader updates all sources.

Hi All! 🤗

“Where have all the websites gone?”

“Websites, as we know them, are dead.”

“Blogging is dead.”

Hi All! 🤗

One question I’ve heard repeatedly from people getting started with their personal website is “what pages and sections – like blog, photos, about me – does my site need to have?” I asked myself the exact same question when I first started with my site. I looked at other people’s websites and eagerly listened to folks arguing that a personal website must have this section or that section. But I’ve since come to the conclusion that maybe this isn’t how you should approach it. Maybe, the first question you should ask yourself about your site is:

What is it for?

Answering this simple but powerful question will help you get clarity about quite a few things, like:

Hi All! 🤗

At the beginning of this year, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website:

In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to share and document their thoughts and publish their work. I’ve written at length before about why this is such a good idea: Your personal website is a place that provides immense creative freedom and control. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission. It is also the perfect place to explore and try new things, like different types of posts, different styles, and new web technologies. It is your playground, your platform, your personal corner on the Web.

So how about we make 2023 the year of the personal website? The year in which we launch our first site or redesign our old one, publish a little more often, and add RSS and Webmentions to our websites so that we can write posts back and forth. The year we make our sites more fussy, more quirky, and more personal. The year we document what we improved, share what we learned, and help each other getting started. The year we finally create a community of critical mass around all our personal websites. The year we take back our Web.

Hi All! 🤗

In the previous issues, we looked at how you can choose a domain name, how a personal website can change your life, and what people are using to build their sites.

But Matthias, I hear you say, that all sounds a lot like something that requires a lot of technical knowledge! What about all your readers who are not nerds? All those folks who don’t know how to install an npm package or configure DNS settings and, rightfully so, also don’t want to learn something like that just to be able to share and own their thoughts on the internet? Wasn’t the Web supposed to be for everyone? Sir Tim, the Olympics, remember? What about that? It sounds a lot like that universe of personal websites you are talking about is actually an exclusive club of web professionals.

You might have a point.

Hi All! 🤗

In the previous issues, we looked at how having a personal website can change your life and what’s in a domain name. Once you’re fired up and registered your domain though, your next decision is probably the one which will have the biggest overall impact and also something that a lot of people asked me about via email: what tech stack, platform, content management system, framework, static site generator and so forth should you use to actually build your site?

This is a tough one, because picking the right solution involves a lot of considerations, like:

• Does the system have all the features I need?

• How easy and how quick will it be to set up my site?

• Do I have the necessary skills and technical expertise?

• Will it be hard to customize the site to my liking?

• Do I need a database? And what is a database?

• How convenient is it to publish new posts?

• How well does the system age? And are there regular updates?

• And how much maintenance will I have to do to keep the site alive?

Hi All! 🤗

So, you registered a domain. And you started working on your personal site. Maybe you already got a first version of your site online. Perhaps you even published a few posts. But suddenly, there’s this question in your head:

“But – is it worth it?”

Almost everyone who starts building a personal website sooner or later asks themselves this question. And it’s a good, an important question. You invest a lot of time and energy into your site, after all. And those are precious resources which we better spend on something that is worthwhile.

Hi All! 🤗

Let’s talk about one of the first things to consider when setting up your personal website: the name, or to be more specific, the domain name. Picking a domain name is something people often struggle with, because it comes with a few questions: What is a “good” domain name for your site? Should you use your real name or a nickname or pseudonym? Does it make sense to include your profession or relevant keywords in the URL? Or should you even get creative and invent a unique or funny name?

That’s a lot of things to consider. So I asked the people of Mastodon: what is your website’s URL and why did you pick it? And are you happy with it or would you choose a different domain name today? And (almost) half of Mastodon replied! Reading through the answers is really interesting if you want to get an idea of which domain names people chose and why.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that many opt for some combination of first and/or last name. Although a few people also called this a “boring” option, it is definitely a safe bet, especially if you are using your personal site professionally in some form. But a lot of folks are also very happy with using a nickname or alias.

Hi All!

Welcome to Own Your Web! 🎉

First of all, I’d like to thank you again for signing up! 🤗 When I shared the link to the newsletter last weekend, I did not expect that so many people would subscribe so quickly. I’m overwhelmed by the response and I see it as a sign that the topic of the newsletter hits a nerve.

It looks like I’m not the only one who is unsatisfied with the current state of social media and the Open Web. Many of us share that vision of a Web that lets everyone participate, a Web that is empowering and full of creative ideas, a Web that is home to respectful and welcoming communities, and a Web where people can truly own their work and the content they create and publish. And you know what? Drowned out by the noise on the large, attention-grabbing, enshittificated social networks, that version of the Web still exists. On our personal websites.