Basic Guide To The Personal Web

many people still want to have an online presence identity and persona but don't want to deal with all the Privacy spyware manipulative forced fake crap on social media apps but what about before social media apps before social media apps there were websites forms blogs dos and RSS feeds they still exist and they are sort of getting a mini Revival of all the current social media mess the idea is called the personal web or web Revival or the small web it's called a lot of different things so I created a map for it in part one we're going to just go through the basics and in part two I'm going to actually go through on how to set it up and then you can decide whether you care or or not websites so apps are a problem a personal website allows you to express yourself much more than an app an app confines you to a space it confines your freedom of thought expression speech and rights websites don't confine you to a space they don't confine you to a group to an ideology to an echo chamber you can build your website anywhere and host it on a million different Services you can literally create anything you want on your website the possibilities are endless there's so much freedom in this that people just do not understand and it's very very diverse you can go about it in so many different ways and there's a lot of different philosophies out there I love seeing all the different types of websites out there and I'm Blown Away by what people are able to create what about social media censorship well you can write out all your thoughts in these things called blogs blogs are often hosted on websites and are much less prone to censorship imagine being able to share your thoughts out and essays to the world on your own platform no need for short witty fake angry micro blogs anymore no need for companies Banning your account because they didn't like what you said you can pretty much say whatever the hell you want in whatever format you want and nothing can get buried because again it's on your website there is sort of an authenticity to blogs that you don't find on traditional social media it feels more genuine and real because you can actually talk about things in a long unfiltered format that critically assess things that you would otherwise not be able to everyone complains that social media is fake or whatever personal websites are honest as Eden would say there's no need to lie on here people are honest and don't really care about likes or followers or whatever crap and I hope it stays that way I've read more honest blogs and articles than anything I've ever seen on social media it's a remarkable starking difference everyone complains about social media algorithms right this half-baked AI algorithm that controls your brains and manipulates you to control your ego to support a corporation that is Harmon society and harming people to sell more products but with RSS feeds you can get the content without the algorithm without the ads without the tracking there's no half-baked AI algorithm in there there's no garbage you get to decide what you want to see there's no more over bloated garbage on Google you can use an RSS reader to read them all and if you are so inclined they do have them for your phone as well web brings one of the biggest reasons people use social media is to find people web brings usually consist of a group or Club of people that have their own websites they can be good if they are part of an active Community the better ones are going to be more blog orientated or form orientated where they're working on projects and they're talking and engaging with each other where they go wrong is when they have no bare minimum effort to joining them and then they get over bloated with hundreds of different websites and then there's really no point in joining them buttons buttons are cool and I think they're much better than the follow button they also help with bot accounts and AI accounts it's cool to add them and add friends you made to your website you can go to them and talk with them and engage with them comment sections on social media really suck uh the comment chains are terrible they can be really fake and nasty and toxic and mean and they can create groups and Echo Chambers and propaganda and gaslighting and garbage and H forms forms are much better and I'm glad that more people are engaging with them I've talked about forms in another video but they are kind of part of the personal web because they're on websites not on apps and I do like them and like their medium messaging okay messaging needs more work and the messaging technology more Protocols are being built the technology is slowly getting better but it needs more work uh Internet relay chats I do really like it's Anonymous you can build it into your website it's really really cool now is the personal web better than traditional social media I would say psychologically yes because it forces you to be a lot more independent and not rely on people as much but it's very variable and it depends on the person the personal web does a better job with social social media algorithms freedom of expression social censorship privacy and security issues it's better at fighting Bots I can be whoever I want I can have my own identity and I am free from corporate narratives from corporate ideologies from propaganda from corporate control centers so I've outlined some principles for the personal web to generally make it better and stir things in the right direction I would take this seriously but then again I wouldn't a lot of people have written things very similar to this and so forth so there are two types of people that build personal websites there is the person that puts a website up and never updates it again and then there's the person that continually updates it every now and then if you're one of the people that just puts it up and never updates it again then I would suggest a onepage site it's kind of like a website that shows all your accounts it's it's the easiest thing in the world and then you'll always have a site regardless of whatever happens to your accounts there are a couple ones you can go out and try link stack omg. law and card there are tutorials on all of them then there are the people that actually want to build a website I really recommend against a website builder people starting out will think a website builder is easier than HTML and CSS I completely disagree if you want to learn HTML and CSS it takes like 2 weeks at most to learn once you know it it's so much easier than a website builder a website builder makes things a lot more difficult than they need to be I highly recommend against website Builders but if you are going to go out and build a website with a website builder I would recommend wordpress.org not the.com one if you're going to build a website using HTML and CSS not a one page or a blogging page for hosting I would use a static site hosting service and I would start off with Neo cities and then move towards GitHub Pages or gitlab Pages or codg pages in combination with Git in visual studio if you want to go further than that I would recommend against using cloud in traditional hosting and I would go straight to self hosting also I would highly recommend downloading your entire site and mounting it to your computer and then making external backups of it like every 6 months or so there are tutorials on this that you can check out but basically it makes it so if the service gets hacked or dies you still have a backup of your entire site and you can always go back and retrieve it and host it on a different service if you go back to the map there are millions of tools to get you you started and there are millions of tutorials out there but there's no teacher out there quite like experience you kind of have to figure out what works for you and what doesn't work for you you also may have to purchase a domain name for your site it's like 10 bucks a year on pork bun it's not that hard make an account then connect the domain name service to your website some people don't want to build an entire website they don't want to learn all this stuff but they still want to put out their thoughts and write essays and write personal blogs and publish articles and all that good stuff there are very simple blogging Building Services for that I personally recommend bare blogs right as zonel lets it's my favorite I love all the different themes I think it's so cool you also have we blog. law although it's very new there's a lot of advice around blogging like what's right what's wrong I think it's great therapy it's much healthier for your brain than uh a lot of other things so if you have an emotional problem instead of going out and trying to make other people miserable and doing and saying things you'll probably regret write a blog post take care of yourself write your thoughts out and express yourself what you're truly feeling by doing this like little bits every day it's going to make those emotional problems a lot less of an issue where you can practice self-acceptance and self growth it's like working out it's like a really good mental exercise for you I'm a big supporter of it there are a bunch of dedicated blogging hosting services that are dedicated to just hosting different blogs so you can take your blog and host it on their Community it's really cool to see all the different types of communities just dedicated to blogging and writing RSS there are a couple RSS readers out there I personally recommend fluent reader or reader 5 for fluent reader if I click on one of the articles I get the entire article through the RSS reader and every time the Blogger updates their blog this will update and I will get a new blog post it's very nice you can have entire groups dedicated to certain blogs like computer science or even podcasts if you want to get YouTube channels just use nidus click the RSS feed button it's right there to add one for every website and for every blog look for this orange button Wi-Fi feed symbol sort of thing it's either on the top of the website or the bottom of the website or in the about page or on the Links Page if you can't find it type feed or RSS or index.xml in the URL sometimes you'll get lucky either two things will happen either you will get the URL and it will look something like this or it will download some file to your computer all you have to do is copy the URL that allowed that file to download to your computer use inspect element click on a little Mouse button up here and click on the Wi-Fi symbol or URL or whatever and then copy this URL once you have that URL copied simply paste it into the RSS reader you can do a little bit of tinkering around with RSS readers you can block some words or phrases or whatever you want for a healthier consumer diet but how do you actually create an RSS feed for your site that is a really good question if you're working on a blogging service or static site generator they usually generate them for you if you are writing in HTML and CSS then you'll have to do it manually which is actually pretty straightforward basically all you need is an XML file on your site I would recommend the main directory but it could be anywhere usually the file is called index.xml but it doesn't matter as long as it's an XML file I created a template file for you to get started under projects under social media under individual projects under the personal web you will see an RSS template click on the RSS template a file will download to your computer then open that file with your chosen application and edit the file most of it is already done for you you literally just have to put in a couple links you have the title which is the title of your website then you have the atom link which is where the XML file is located in this case it's located in my home directory then you have the description in this case blog posts and then the language which in this case it's English for the build date you want to constantly update this link and add it to your XML file every time you update your blogs simply go to timestamp generator.com and copy the date under the RFC 2822 and just paste it here and then just do the same thing for timestamp just copy the timestamp and paste it under the TTL just make sure to update the timestamp and date links every single time you update the XML file if you actually want to add a blog post what you need is an item tag I usually just copy and paste these every single time it's very simple in between the title tags add the title of the blog post in between the link tags add the URL to the blog post and in between the description tags in between the C data brackets paste the HTML code of the blog not the CSS just the HTML also if you have images make sure to use the full URL not just the trajectory URL under the publish date use the timestamp generator to generate a date for when the blog was published use RFC 2822 and then for Guild use the same URL you used for link it's basically the link to your blog post and that's it just make sure to be consistent for every blog post it's really not that bad it takes like a minute or two for me to do setting it up is the hard part I really recommend doing this manually I'm against generators it's kind of like the same deal with website Builders it's just way easier to manually do it and set it up than use these Services if you are going to do this consistently I highly recommend doing it this way but it's really up to you one more thing I would highly recommend against writing a Blog in markdown react code or some other JavaScript framework or some crap I think it's Overkill and it over complicates things too much so let's talk about some tools you can use for finding personal websites this is all in the map if I search anything on Google I will get corporate SEO AI over bloed garbage that I don't want to see but I can use a different better search engine instead like marginalia if I search mushrooms on marginalia I can filter it by popular small web blogs Academia vintage wikis forms docks recipes and I find this so much better for finding good websites I can use it for so many different things so many different topics that when I originally used Google I would get so much garbage but with this I can actually get cool sites that I like that I enjoy that I'll enjoy reading and I'll discover cool things things that I never knew even existed like look at this I found a cool synthwave theme for visual studio this is so much better and most people have no idea this even exists like 90% of people still use Google you also have wiby where people will submit individual websites they like that aren't bloated and then if you search a term you will find that term on those individual websites you also have a bunch of others like Curly and kaggy which is paid you need an account but I've heard good stuff about it and there's also search my site so there are search engines for the personal web if you want to find websites let's talk about some resources so this will show you all the resources to get you started with the personal web it was built by the 32bit cafe Community who specializes in trying to make the personal web better and more accessible they're always changing it and adding links it's very very nice they have various links for HTML Services Graphics programs and Alternatives going back to the topic of communities there are a lot of communities for the personal web I already talked about the 32bit cafe Community they have a website you can check them out but there's also the Indie web they do sort of the exact same thing it's another community of IND independent personal site owners they have a Mastadon instance called Indie we.so where all the personal website owners have Mastadon accounts I do like their principles and I think it would be wise to follow some of them so if you want to message people before Discord there were Internet relay chats and xmpp servers they still exist believe it or not I've seen a couple personal websites use them as contact info so I think it's important to still go through them so I have both Internet relay chat and xmpp guides on my website and on the map either way you can find them in the same locations as everything else for Internet relay chats as for what clients you should get I've seen people recommend terminal clients as the best um I've heard WeChat is a little better than IR SSI but you can't really go wrong with either as as far as servers go I've heard libria chat is the most popular but I'm sure all of these are fine as well as far as xmpp goes I've heard good things about all these clients and servers although 404 City especially looks pretty cool web Rings I've added these pretty recently most of them should work if you want to see more lists go to Ray webrings list he collects them all some advice don't join a lot don't join big ones or inactive ones join small ones join ones where there is an active Community centered around some activity like blogging or a form or whatever where they work hard and actually put in effort and talk to people it's kind of like a club meaning the smaller and more active and more hobby based it is the better to actually join them just follow the rules and then all you need to do is add the HTML or JavaScript button or whatever the hell to your website if you want to actually build your own there are a lot of resources out there for it there's a starter kit on GitHub where you can just Fork the code I highly recommend bis Ray's site he talks all about web Rings other than that I feel like I have pretty much gone through as many things as possible to get you started again I will constantly update this map with new links or resources or anything else I find I also want to say that yes everyone's website looks like crap in the beginning it takes a little bit before you get it to where you want it and even then it probably still could use a couple updates some of the best websites you see out there have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of updates so this is a sort of thing you have to keep updating every couple of days or weeks or so forth if that sort a thing doesn't appeal to you then don't build one build a onepage site instead other than that though the personal web isn't for everyone but for the people that can build it into their lifestyle it's a great alternative to the traditional corporate narrative that we're told

Channel: Psychcool

Views: 10,098

Keywords: The Personal Web, personal website, personal blog, soulless, soul, portfolio, web, html, websites, linktree, creativity, css, blog, Web Revival, Small Web, Web 1.0

Id: zswyWBtF-7Y

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024