Social media and the rest, a personal website is best

Showing all posts tagged: self publishing

Social media and the rest, a personal website is best

11 April 2025

A website, your own personal website, is just like this—a digital home, on the web. With all the same comforts, familiarities and problems that need a-fixin’.

Does your personal website, your blog, feel like home? Mine does, and always has.

Although I’ve long been a social media participant, albeit not a particularly active one, the prospect of abandoning this website to go all in on a social media platform, maybe even several, never once crossed my mind. This even as I watched contemporaries do exactly that, and go on to sometimes garner large followings.

I always viewed the social media platforms I was a member of as outposts for my website. Like garden sheds (dare I say outhouses) you might build in the garden outside your home. Fragile structures that may not withstand a storm, in the same way a house can. Or the erratic whims of a billionaire owner. To say nothing of inconsistent moderation policies and erratic algorithms.

Owning and maintaining a house, home, is extra work and cost, but a far better investment than all those garden sheds.

An old school blogger returns, the Oceania Web Atlas launches

10 April 2025

American designer Jason Santa Maria, and co-founder of A Book Apart, a seller of numerous influential design publications, has returned to blogging after an eight year hiatus. You see, we all come back eventually. Once a blogger, always a blogger…

Philipp Lunch is based in Cologne, Germany, and recently launched a blog/personal website, despite it being not finished, and preferring to let it evolve. Yes, that is the trajectory of many a personal website. Australian physicist Cameron Jones’ website comes with the eye-catching name Caffeine and Lasers. He also has a shot at answering the question of the ages: where are all the aliens? Hmm, what do you think? Are they giving us the silent treatment, or are we very, very, lucky to be here?

Caleb Herbert resides in Missouri, in the Unites States. Instead of a smartphone, he keeps a notepad and pen in his pocket. Bet you weren’t expecting to hear that. Portland based American software developer Sage has been online since 2013, and is constantly redesigning their website. Remember those long ago days when we used to redesign our websites like every week?

Why we are still using 88 × 31 buttons? Website buttons (that’s what I’ll call them), particularly those with the dimension of 88 by 31 pixels, used to adorn personal websites during the late 1990’s. They pretty much disappeared during the blogging era, but thanks to Indie Web/Small Web, and the personal website revival, are enjoying a resurgence. 88 by 31 pixels may not seem like much of a canvas to work with, but as the works posted on Button Wall go to show, an economy of size is no inhibitor to creativity.

A week or two ago, Melbourne, Australia, based author and content creator Zachary Kai launched the Oceania Web Atlas, a web directory for bloggers and personal website publishers, based in the Oceania region. If you’re a local, submit your website. Thanks for including mine Zach.

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blogs, IndieWeb, self publishing

Some blogs are digital gardens, but not all of them

31 March 2025

Brisbane, Australia, based blogger Colin Morris, writing about website analogies:

My site isn’t a garden. I’ve seen garden sites, tended to grow and sprout and flower. Ordered in rows or disordered in natural growth.

disassociated is not a garden, a digital garden, either.

A digital garden could be seen as progression, an evolution even, of blogs and personal websites. Whereas content on blogs — old school blogs like this one — is usually considered complete when published, a digital garden’s content is often a work in progress. Articles, or posts, which start out as seedlings, are added to as research into their subject matter continues, or new information comes to light. It’s a sensible approach since knowledge is never complete.

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blogs, Indie Web, self publishing

Read Bean Ice Cream for dessert and other blogs

20 March 2025

Dave Winer is on the look out for old-school bloggers who have been writing since circa 2005, and are still going. Anyone who’s been blogging for twenty-plus years is certainly deserving of recognition, but let’s not overlook people are new to the game.

If there were an award for the most memorable blog name, then ReadBeanIceCream might well be the winner. Sylvester Ady is a Malaysian uni student writing about studying, time management, building websites and love. And probably more as time goes on.

The .uk domain threw me at first, but Sean Boyer resides in Canada. Music, politics, software development, and Linux (my favourite OS), are among topics he plans to write about. That’s how we did it in the old days, there was no such thing as niche blogging, it was a case of anything goes.

Aevisia has recently launched the Small Web Movement, a growing resource for people who want to setup their own personal websites in the Indie Web/Small Web spirit. And last, but by no means least, Indieseek.xyz is a web directory curated by Brad Enslen, dedicated to independent, and personal websites. Thanks for including disassociated.

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blogs, IndieWeb, self publishing

A personal website is a website published by a person

10 March 2025

I’ve always regarded disassociated as a personal website. Others might see it differently.

For instance, I read a few of the IndieWeb blogs, and when compared with some of those people, my website is not personal. I don’t usually write “dear diary” like journal entries, although I do publish a variation thereof, which I post to my socials feeds. But I don’t delve too much what into about I’m thinking about on a personal level, or what I’m grappling with in my day-to-day life.

Still, it’s a good question to ask: how personal should a personal website be? But it’s one only the person who owns the website can really answer.

Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers

4 March 2025

From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever.

SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals.

There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the past, and possibly continues to. But I still see good levels of referrals here via search engines, despite minimal utilisation of SEO. Maybe that’s because, ironically, I’ve always viewed SEO as a waste of time.

Back in the day when blogger in-person gatherings seemed to take place every other week, I took care not to bring SEO into any conversations I had. The dangers of doing so were akin to flying head first into a black hole. As in, sometimes there could be no escape. It seemed to me that if SEO wasn’t a thing, some people would have nothing else to talk about.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely want to bag out SEO either. Like it or lump it, SEO has a role, albeit a small role, in the work of independent self-publishers. Say what you will about search engines, and I know there’s strong opinions on the topic, but they still help people discover content and information, and reach this website. Even in the age of Google Zero.

And when it comes to content promotion, albeit passive promotion, search engines are far less effort than social media channels. For a long while social media channels were my main method of promoting content, but I was never fully comfortable doing things that way. I often felt I was foisting stuff upon people. Even though they had chosen to follow me.

Plus social media channels always felt like a distraction to what was really important: my website. Leaving the task of spreading word about my work to the search engines seems like a better idea, while allowing me to dispense with the socials. It’s truly a set and forget process. All I need do is publish, and move on to something else. The search engines do the rest.

Of course, that’s not the way anyone attempting to manipulate, or whatever they call it, the rankings, the SERPs, I think it is, see things. But the search engines are not oblivious to this activity, as much as an overstatement of the obvious that may sound. Because if SEO manipulation was truly excessive, surely anything I publish would go unnoticed by search engines, as it would be crowded out.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The search engines referrals may be modest, but deliver more than the socials ever did. Perhaps we can still dare to imagine that content remains paramount. Despite on-going SEO manipulation and, of course, ever present algorithms.

Twenty-five years blogging, the more things change, the less they change

21 February 2025

Matt Webb has been blogging for twenty-five years. What an incredible milestone. Obviously, much has changed in the realm of self-publishing since Webb started out in 2000. Back then, as he points out, we blogged as if we were using social media platforms like Twitter/X:

So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else (I had a couple dozen sites I would pop open each morning).

Now we — though maybe not so much myself, or the more #IndieWeb people reading this — use social media platforms, specifically Instagram, as if they were blogging platforms.

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blogs, history, self publishing

Rambles.NET, a webzine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999

6 January 2025

Rambles.NET is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media present.

I had a crack at publishing a webzine way back in the day, something called channel static (Internet Archive link). Notice my ever-present use of lower case styling for proper website names.

Like all good webzines of the day (and today), Rambles published articles on a wide range of topics, including music, film, literature, pop culture, nature, history, science, religion, steampunk, and the supernatural. Check out the impressive list of past and present contributors.

In a way, I always considered disassociated to be more a webzine than anything else. Granted, only with one writer, and very much on and off in the twenty-five plus years this website has been online.

Rambles has no RSS feed that I can see, so you’ll have to read it the old fashion way: with a browser.

Substack, no alternative to independent websites and blogs

25 November 2024

Online publishing platform Substack, founded in 2017, was all anyone could talk about by 2022. Writers were scrambling to jump on the bandwagon, having heard tales of six-figure revenues being earned by some publishers. Even though we’ve heard those sorts of stories before. I even joined up myself, to see what the fuss was about.

But as someone who’s had their own web presence for decades, I couldn’t see the appeal of incorporating my brand into someone else’s. I think I only ever published one short article there.

But I’d already been hearing Substack appeared to permit the proliferation of misinformation, conspiracy theorists, and far-right ideologies, and was taking no action against the publishers of such content. I have no interest whatsoever in reading that sort of material, but it makes me wonder. Should content some people find objectionable actually be deleted by the administrators of a publishing platform like Substack? And then: how do we define what is acceptable, and what’s not?

For me, hate-speech and anything inciting violence or lawlessness, is unacceptable. Other topics, such as misinformation, and conspiracy theories, may be a little harder to quantify. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, almost everyone I knew complied with stay-at-home orders, and vaccine mandates. However there were some, neighbours, and others I’d see regularly, who hitherto seemed to be no different than me, convinced COVID-19 was a hoax, and the vaccines posed a serious threat.

I’d tell these people I disagreed with what they thought, but their resolve was unstinting. They believed absolutely in what they thought. They were wrong in my eyes, their views plain dangerous to say the least, but this is a democracy, and, like it or lump it, we’re all entitled to our opinion. No doubt, some of these people, would, if they read my blog, object to some of the content I publish here. But does that, of itself, constitute grounds for having it (somehow) forcibly removed?

But back to Substack. American blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, for one, believes the platform was created to give voice to extremists:

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four.

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball, however counters with the idea that Substack is simply an open-for-all publishing platform:

I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

Despite my indifference to Substack, this is largely how I see things as well. I’ve read numerous articles published on Substack, which are just always useful and informative. I’ve never encountered anything hateful, deliberately misleading, or conspiratorial, though obviously such content exists. As it would on self-hosted websites/blogs that are not part of any publishing platform.

Calls to have such content removed seem pointless, unless laws, defamation for instance, are contravened. Fighting fire with fire may be the only option. Writing in response, and criticising material that is hateful or misleading. Do so from your own, self-hosted, independent, website though. Do not allow any publishing platform to assimilate your brand, or your content.

Do not comment on another website, when you can write on your own

29 April 2024

The more things change, the more they stay the same, perhaps? Manuel Moreale writing the other week about blog post comments:

I’m not a fan of comments in general and I think commenting on something should be done in one of two ways: 1. Privately via email or via direct messaging. 2. Publicly by posting a reply on your own website.

Back in the day, when the first inceptions of disassociated came online in the late 90’s, these were just about the only options for communicating with a personal website owner. There were of course guestbooks, which, contrary to popular belief, are still alive and well. Maybe I’ll bring one back here.

But if you wanted to respond to something someone had written in their online journal, writing a post in reply, on your own website, was the way to go. Blog post comments were unheard of in the nineties, as indeed, for the most part, was the term blog. But posts-in-response were a great way to build rapport with other website owners, network, and even collaborate.

You never knew what might come of some of these ongoing reply-to-something-someone-had-written-on-their-personal-websites confabs.

For a group of mainly Sydney based web creatives, including me, Jen Leheny, and Justin Fox, (sorry, I can’t find websites for the others), the result was the formation of the Australian INfront. And for almost twenty years from 1999, INfront brought Australian web design front and centre globally.

Blog comments were also a great way to build rapport and network, but I almost think the case can be made that they spelt the end of the personal website. Now that readers of a website/blog could respond to a post in the same place, many people no longer needed their own website to do so.

The likes of Twitter, when it arrived, a microblogging platform, where users only needed to create an account to get posting, hastened the decline of the personal website. But, thankfully, nothing resulted, so far, in their extinction.

Post comments are not unheard of here, but I rarely enable them. And that’s because I’ve long believed the best way to comment on something you’ve seen here is to either contact me, or, preferably, write a post on your own website.

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blogs, self publishing, writing

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