A Personal Website Feels Like A Notebook

A personal website is not a very practical object. It needs time and occasional maintenance. Pages break. Links go dead. Designs become outdated. Sometimes you spend an hour on a change that almost nobody will notice. None of this is a good use of an evening, rationally speaking.

I still like having one. This post is an attempt to explain why, partly because I have been wondering about it myself.

What the alternatives offer

In 2008, there are better options for most of what a personal website does. Blogger, acquired by Google in 2003, hosts a blog for free with no maintenance required. WordPress.com, launched in 2005 as a hosted service separate from the self-hosted WordPress.org software, offers a more feature-rich alternative at no cost. Facebook, which opened to the general public in September 2006 and had over 100 million active users by August 2008, handles social updates and keeps them findable by the people you already know. MySpace allows personal expression with customisable profiles that my website cannot match in visual complexity. LinkedIn manages professional presence more efficiently.

These platforms are also where the audience is. Writing on a personal website means writing for anyone who happens to find it — mostly through search, occasionally through links from other sites. Writing on a platform means writing for an existing community.

The blogosphere as an interconnected community of self-hosted blogs peaked roughly between 2003 and 2007. The A-List bloggers — Daring Fireball, Kottke.org, John Gruber’s site, Joel on Software — built audiences through links from each other, from Technorati’s blog indexing, and from RSS readers. That era is being replaced by something more centralised. Platform-hosted writing reaches more people more efficiently. But something changes when the writing lives on someone else’s infrastructure under someone else’s rules.

So why maintain a personal website at all?

What a personal website is that platforms are not

The answer, I think, is control and continuity. A personal website is a space I define. There is no template that shapes what I can say or how it can look. There is no algorithm deciding who sees which posts. There is no policy about appropriate content that could change next year. There is no account that could be suspended or a company that could shut down.

This matters more than it might seem. Services that were popular two years ago sometimes disappear. Platforms change their character as they grow. A personal website that has existed for several years still exists in the same way — assuming the domain is renewed and the hosting continues. The persistence is under my control rather than a company’s.

The notebook quality

A notebook is not a publication. A notebook holds half-formed ideas, questions, observations that did not reach a conclusion, references you wanted to remember. The fact that it is not polished is part of what makes it useful — you can write something down without committing to it.

A personal website can work similarly. I can write a short note about something I found interesting without making it a formal article. I can document a technical problem I solved, knowing that the main reader will be me, six months later, when I encounter the same problem. I can change my mind about something and update the page.

This is different from how a blog is usually described — as a publication with readers, a regular schedule, a consistent topic. A personal website can be a publication when the writing is good enough, but it does not have to be. It can also just be a notebook that happens to be online.

The archive quality

When I read something I wrote a few years ago, I notice things that the writing itself does not contain. I remember what I was curious about at the time, what problems I was working on, what I understood and what I did not. The writing acts as an index into memory that would otherwise become inaccessible.

The uncomfortable version of this: old writing reveals how you thought then, which is often different from how you think now. Opinions that seemed obvious turn out to have been partial. Explanations that felt clear were missing something. This is uncomfortable in a way that is useful. If everything from the past looks correct in retrospect, maybe not much has actually changed.

What I am not claiming

I am not claiming that personal websites are more valuable than platforms, or that everyone should have one, or that platform writing is somehow less legitimate. These are different tools for different purposes.

What I am saying is that for certain things — a space you control, a record that persists, a notebook that can be public — a personal website does something the alternatives do not do as well. The extra maintenance it requires is the cost of that difference. Most days I think it is worth it.