Writings from the Furnace

Why make your own website in this day and age? It certainly won’t have the same reach as tweets or facebook¹ posts may have. It is also a lot more time consuming, given the effort necessary to first learn how to do it, then effectively working to make it a reality, and being “rewarded” with a fraction of the attention (be it readership or otherwise) for many times the effort. It truly seems to make no sense. And yet many people choose to do so, myself included. I’d like to think a bit about this question, and to share my conclusions.

First and foremost, it’s a matter of self-expression. Platforms such as Facebook are very convenient—from the latin for “to come together”² or “to come alongside”—which means precisely that: they offer easy access, but by taking this deal you inextricably bind yourself with their interests and their objectives (namely pushing ads, but also their political, aesthetic, and philosophical preferences, which are baked into the structure of the website), which you may well disagree with (I personally abhor ads). To choose to go “your own way”, so to speak, means putting the integrity of such concerns above the desire to reach as many people as possible. It must be said that I don’t intend to write this as a sort of “value judgment”: there are very valid reasons as to not wanting to make your own website, such as not wanting to have to learn a bunch of shit just to have a place to show your writing or your art to not many people.

Secondly, it’s a matter of craftsmanship: there are many ways of having your own website, most notably by using a blog provider (such as Wordpress) or a service which offers templates (such as Weebly), which make it a lot easier to have a nice-looking website. To hand-craft something takes time and dedication, which might be better spent caring abount the content of the website, instead of its form and functionality. That is a very valid concern. But there is something quite special when the form of the website is taylored for its content to the point of becoming inseparable. It’s like typesetting and binding a book which you wrote yourself; and though often frustrating, it can be immensely rewarding. (Programmers may find this very ordinary, but for the rare person it can be a rare opportunity to have so much control over their own work).

Finally, a website is dictated only by yourself: all mistakes are your own, but so are all of its successes. It is, in a sense, laying yourself bare in face of the world—which can be daunting and maybe even kinda scary, but also quite exciting.

As such, should you make your own website? If you’re reading this, odds are you already have your own, given where I’m hosting this (Neocities). But leaving that aside, it’s actually a hard question to answer. Clearly it’s way too time consuming for me to just go and say “yeah, just do it!” Purely as my own opinion, I find personal websites fascinating, no matter their content (and how acquainted I’m with it). It always feels like entering into someone’s personal world, and like getting to understand someone I don’t really know personally but that somehow I feel a sort of kindred spirit with them, a kind of kinship to a group of oddballs who just want to show the world what they’re interested in. So if you want a way to express yourself that is beholden pretty much to no one but yourself, I say “do it!” It’s pretty interesting, though perhaps at times frustrating. Like much else in life, I suppose.

That being said, there are a few pointers I can give to people who are interested in making their own website. First of all, it really helps to have a vision of what you wish to make, i.e. some idea of the finished product—though a vague idea already helps. This can be as simple as answering the question “what do you want to show on your website?” Writing? Drawing? Photographs? Poetry? Surveys? It’s obviously up to you, but different kinds of content are best served by different forms of displaying it (which by no means signifies that there is a “best” way to make a website; just harder/easier ones, with more or less effective results.)

With that out of the way, it so happens that crafting your own website has become immensely easier—though also more complicated. If during the late 90’s you could get away with very simple CSS styling (if that much!), today expectations are much higher, such as complex CSS setups like Grid and Flexbox. and interactivity is taken for granted through Javascript, which has raised the ceiling considerably on what one considers to be a “web page”.³ The “O.G.” readers of this website in its previous versions may remember that I hand-crafted and coded everything. It was a great experience, though a pain to maintain. I still stand by that choice, since I learned a lot from it, but this time around I decided to make my life a little bit easier by using Hugo.

Hugo is a static website generator and manager written in Golang; this means that once you have everything set-up, all you have to do is write markdown files (little more than plain text files) and it’ll take care for you of making it all work together nicely. There are numerous Hugo templates available, ways of styling your website, that have been created by people, buy you can also do as I have and create your own template from scratch.⁴ Once your template is set-up, it’s a breeze to upload content, since it’s just a static website, much like those of the 90’s (I’m happy I’ll never have to muck about with PHP ever again), i.e. a collection of files that don’t require databases and the like.

It can be asked if taking a template someone else made is the same as posting on Facebook or whatever. Maybe one could argue that, but I disagree. First of all, you never lose creative control over what you’re doing. If something displeases you about the template, you can always change it yourself to something else more suitable. Besides that, this argument of “purity” amounts to little more than pointless gatekeeping; there is nothing wrong with using and learning from helpful tools if they suit your purpose as intended (which is why I don’t see anything wrong with using Facebook or Twitter if they suite your purposes—though I’d wager many people are dissatisfied with those platforms).

Still, the greater reach is something desirable, which is why if that’s the case for you it might be a good idea to follow Cory Doctorow’s example: having a personal hand-tailored website that works as intended, but also posting your content in as many vehicles as possible, always pointing to the original website as the best way to access it. It’s obviously a lot of work, made easier by writing scripts that automate the process as much as possible, but it’s a way to enjoy the best of both worlds.⁵

If anything I’ve said here has piqued your interest, then I hope you’ll give it a shot. It can be a lot of fun! If you have any questions, feel free to write me an email (my address can be found in the About page of this website) and I’ll try to help as much as I can.

Footnotes