Making version noir
A case study in making a beautiful responsive homepage.
Link tags: homepage
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Small dents in the IndieWeb · Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul has been doing so much fantastic work with the indie web community, not least of which is co-organising Indie Web Camp Brighton—just ten days away now!
The personality of a personal website – Manu
Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.
Streams of Consciousness · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self.
home sweet homepage
I can’t remember the last time that a website made me smile like this.
🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online
Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
Diana Ashktorab
This is my new favourite indie web site (super performant and responsive too).
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review
Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional. Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements. The sense of time and space to explore is key.
Nils Binder’s Website
The “Adjust CSS” slider on this delightful homepage is an effective (and cute) illustration of progressive enhancement in action.
A love letter to my website - DESK Magazine
We choose whether our work stays alive on the internet. As long as we keep our hosting active, our site remains online. Compare that to social media platforms that go public one day and bankrupt the next, shutting down their app and your content along with it.
But the real truth is that as long as we’re putting our work in someone else’s hands, we forfeit our ownership over it. When we create our own website, we own it – at least to the extent that the internet, beautiful in its amorphous existence, can be owned.
Why I Have a Website and You Should Too · Jamie Tanna | Software (Quality) Engineer
I know a number of people who blog as a way to express themselves, for expression’s sake, rather than for anyone else wanting to read it. It’s a great way to have a place to “scream into the void” and share your thoughts.
Why We All Need a Personal Website – Plus Practical Tips for How to Build One - Adobe 99U
The best time to make a personal website is 20 years ago. The second best time to make a personal website is now.
Chris offers some illustrated advice:
- Define the purpose of your site
- Organize your content
- Look for inspiration
- Own your own domain name
- Build your website
Simon Collison | Timeline
I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Simon describes the process of curating the lovely timeline on his personal homepage.
My timeline is just like me, and just like my life: unfinished, and far from perfect.
Home Page — Doug Block
There’s a new reissue of the twenty year old documentary on Justin Hall’s links.net and the early days of the web.
Lynn Fisher
This homepage is media-querytastic. It’s so refreshing to see this kind of fun experimentation on a personal site—have fun resizing your browser window!
How the BBC News website has changed over the past 20 years - BBC News
Two decades redesigning/realigning the BBC News home page.
Of the Web • Kyle Gach
I’ve been on the web for most of my life, but, without a site to call home, I haven’t been of the web for far too long.