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Gabe Chantayan

Building a personal website is now easier than ever

4 min read ยท 708 words

Back in the old days of the internet, everyone had their own personal website. Be it self-hosted or through a host like GeoCities, it was simple to whip up your own little personal corner of the internet. Then came social media and the proliferation of tech throughout the general population, and a monoculture started to take route.

"It's too hard!" critics of personal sites decried. "Social media is simpler!" And thus began the decline of having one's own website. The ease-of-use provided by social media trumped any desire for personalization provided by a personal website.

The number of websites (and later, apps) one maintained an account on steadily shrunk, individual forums being replaced by Reddit, individual blogs succumbing to Tumblr and Substack, image-based content folding into Instagram and Facebook, and general communications fleeing to The Bird App1 and Snapchat.

The monoculture seems to be saturated. Aside from (admittedly more niche) sites such as RateYourMusic and Letterboxd, most content my peers and I interact with are through Instagram nowadays. No longer is the social meta "how cool can I make my website" but "how cool can I make the cover images of my Instagram profile".

Personal websites still exist, but they have been relegated to very niche use cases, namely portfolios for designers or software engineers. That sucks! We don't need more elaborate LinkedIn profiles, we need culture! We need to express ourselves! We need to show the world who we are! We need to proclaim what makes us unique!

Luckily, in the past few years a new technology has emerged that makes the creation of personal websites easy. It drops the barrier from knowing how to program HTML, lower than dragging and dropping, down to natural language. You can type in English2 and make a website! How fucking cool is that!?

Before I introduce you this technology, we must talk about the elephant in the room.

The Elephant in the Room

It's time to talk about the elephant in the room. Rip the band-aid off. The technology is AI. But wait, before you scoff and close the tab, hear me out.

  1. AI was made for this sort of thing. Seriously. Nowadays, most AIs are tuned for developers to make coding easier. A significant portion of the work I do on a day-to-day basis is writing detailed instructions and passing it off to an AI to implement while I guide and review what gets implemented.
  2. The environmental impact is much less than you think. A shocker, I know. The water AI uses is non-potable (AKA, water that is unsafe to drink to begin with), and the energy impact of one message to an AI has the same as a single Google search in 2008. Nearly twenty years ago, before they jacked it up the ass with ads and their new personal algorithms and all this other stuff that consumes so much energy they dare not disclose.
  3. Don't worry, it's not stealing. Due to the fundamental ways the internet works, all the code of webpages is public. You can go and view the code of any website by right-clicking and hitting "View Source" or "Inspect Element". It's how most web developers learn how to code their first websites, and how even seasoned developers learn new tricks.

Okay now that that is cleared up

If you don't know how to code, seriously try going on Claude and talk to it for a little to try to make a website. It can do everything, even displaying, in-browser. It is the best programming AI by miles.

Once you make something, you can upload it on NeoCities for absolutely free! No strings attached!

Below I've listed a few links you can get inspiration from for your own personal website.

Be the change the world needs. Break free from the monotony, showcase yourself!

Random Assortment of Inspiration

You could browse NeoCities and get a good idea of some stuff, or, have a random list of some websites I've found that I think to be cool

1

Twitter

2

Or Spanish or Russian or Basque or whatever. Not my prerogative.