Showing all posts about self publishing

Good Internet, an online magazine for personal website publishers

30 May 2025

Good Internet launched this week.

Good Internet is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital quarterly magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation. The name Good Internet comes from Katie Baker’s The Day the Good Internet Died, hopefully proving that headline wrong.

Good Internet looks like it will be a great resource for indie web/small web publishers.

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Happy twentieth birthday to swissmiss, the blog of Tina Roth Eisenberg

29 May 2025

swissmiss went live on 27 May 2005. Twenty years is a long time. Congratulations.

That was Tina v1.0; No kids, single, hadn’t started any businesses yet. This blog opened doors. Forever grateful.

Blogs open doors, still, even today. disassociated was opening doors for me way back in 2010:

If you’re onto a good thing you’ll be doing far more than merely writing and posting articles.

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Social media and the rest, a personal website is best

11 April 2025

Mike Sass, writing at Shellsharks:

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.

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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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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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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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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.

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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.

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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 people reading this — use social media platforms, specifically Instagram, as if they were blogging platforms.

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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.

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