Why this blog?
I don't like the modern internet. I spend most of my time on walled-garden social networks: hyper-connected, designed to make you doomscroll without ever really engaging with the kind of content you signed up for (you know, thoughtful posts, posts from people you actually follow but who never show up in your feed). Not to mention the fact that at any given point of time, the intentionality with which you've designed your online space can change (Instagram grid sizes, Twitter likes disappearing).
Amidst all this, I've reached a breaking point, and want to carve out my own space on the internet, one where my friends (or strangers) who want to know what I'm thinking/what I've been up to, can intentionally visit my space and take a walk around, visit links that spark their interest, and stay as long as they like. I've been intentionally moving towards a way of browsing from the days when I began: curating a list of my favourite websites and keeping up-to-date with what they publish. This approach lends itself wonderfully towards rabbit-holing, which is my preferred way of internet exploration, rather than bite-sized scroll-first methods. And there's no friction to leaving when I want to.
This looks like going back to the good ol' days of RSS feeds–I've already ported all the newsletter and blogs I like to follow there, and check it like the morning newspaper over breakfast and coffee–which already feels more intentional and present with the writings. Earlier, I'd gloss over or even skip the longer posts–look! There's a shocking image or heading in the post just underneath this. It's super small, let me take a quick look, and the next one, and the next one. And I found myself not using those platforms the way I intended, which was to not only follow the people I was interested in, but also post my own thoughts from time to time.
I want to use this as a space, primarily for myself, where I write down weeknotes, essays, short thoughts, document my projects, share links, and create a long-term archive of the person I am now; without any audience, analytics, or engagement in mind. A digital scrapbook, a journal, a place to invite people to, and most importantly, a place for experimentation and play.
There's something to be said about the big networks, and I won't fully leave them for now, but that's not where I want to spend most of my time online.
Why a personal website?
Over the years I've written on-and-off (mostly off...) on the internet, and have seen platforms look completely different from what they were when starting out. Take Substack or Medium for example. Their model completely changed over time: Vendor lock-in, popups, walled garden, AI, various kinds of logins needed to follow/comment. Every time I now visit these sites it pushed me towards suggested blogs and newsletters, and I barely see the accounts I want to–the ones I followed. Plus, when using Substack, I was getting way too caught up in analytics on the site, which was also subconsciously affecting what and when I write based on the image I had in my head of the people who were reading it and how they would perceive it. I do not want to think about these things when sitting down to write
Having your own website is a way of future-proofing the things you share and owning them yourself. I do not want to contribute to tech companies who change their terms of service at anytime and do not let you export your data. This way, it's relatively easy to move all my content if I decide to change where and how I'm hosting this.
It's easier to share my thoughts or experience with someone online when it's something I've catalogued before. Building a trail over time; ability to use metadata to make connection graphs, catalogue tags etc. Personal website as a way of cataloguing my projects/interests over time in a way that makes sense to the way I process and store information. I also like displaying my recent media in one place (check out my Now page!) as a sort of current window into my life.
Why build from scratch?
I'm moving into an age where I'm leaning towards hobby projects and building things for myself, with more intentionality, and with the intention of learning things and documenting my learnings.
While looking into available solutions, I came across many ready-made options out there. One of them I really considered was [bearblog.dev], which seemed to be exactly what I was looking for (and which I'd also highly recommend to someone wanting to make their own!): lightweight projects that were markdown-based, and zero friction to write + get started. I finally decided against it, mainly because I realised that my site wasn't a space just to write, but to learn and experiment and I wanted to use this opportunity to learn basic web development, while also leaving the door open for future experiments (ways to style pages for example) without being locked into the design and layout decisions I make at the very start.
I want the actual backend to also be intentional, and want to understand every aspect of how this site is created, powered, deployed, hosted (or at least understand the accepted level of abstraction); to start very basic and add functionality as needed as an opportunity to learn. I've ended up with a system and repository where I know what each sub-folder does and why it's there.
What I wanted in this website
- Minimal resistance to add new pages Create a new page and start writing when wanting to publish a new post.
- Markdown as a base to generate page content This was my non-negotiable. When I think quick-notes on the PC, it's always markdown-style writing. It's way more human-readable in its raw form compared to html. So I knew I wanted a way to automatically render markdown to html (which isn't difficult to do actually, but it influenced how I began searching around for solutions as a newbie to the field).
- Easy way to store metadata to be used later in the form of frontmatter I love metadata. Have to actively hold myself back from having too much metadata. So I wanted a way to generate, store, and later retrieve metadata for posts (kind of like Obsidian but for a personal website now that I think about it).