We tend to have online accounts across different social networks and services. We upload our projects in some sites, we post on different ones and we follow different people on all of them. Our online identities—along with everything we share—are all over the place, but there is a way to solve this (and many other problems): personal websites.
Creating a personal website is a great way to share our projects, experiences, thoughts, etc. under our own terms, without being limited to a given theme or a couple of available options in a certain service. A personal website allows you to customize it as you want, whether that is quickly setting up a simple website with a portfolio, spending time creating the perfect CSS file or even setting up a service to share files with your friends using a password.
You can buy a personal domain at a considerably cheap price (less than $12 a year for a
.me, .org or .com domain), but it will provide you with
something much more valuable: your corner of the Internet. Nobody can shut down your domain
because it is no longer profitable and if your host can't continue to provide you with what you
need, or they change their terms, you can simply switch companies, and still show your website
under the same URL. You can change anything on the "backstage", and others will always find you at
the same place.
If you don't have any experience with programming or using plain text and you don't want to spend time getting familiar with it, you can use WordPress1 to create your site. It is a free (as in freedom) content management system that will allow you to build a site without much HTML/CSS knowledge. If you are more comfortable with plain text and the terminal or want to get in touch with them, building a static site that supports Markdown will probably be a much better option.
Most of the websites we visit are dynamic. That means that the server we are retrieving the pages from is executing a program, and the pages we see are the results of that web application. Dynamic sites can be useful when we want users to be able to edit data. For instance, if users can log in and publish posts, that would require a dynamic site.
On the other hand, there are static websites. In this case, the server simply serves files that are already stored on the server. So, for a given URL, everybody sees the same HTML (and JavaScript and CSS). You probably won't require a dynamic personal website, since you'll probably be publishing information about you, your projects, etc., without the need of a server that does real-time calculations to serve a page2.
Why am I talking about static sites? Well, they offer some advantages over dynamic ones.
Because of these advantages, you can find free hosting for static sites and lower prices when self-hosting or using shared-hosting because of the lower amount of resources needed. Furthermore, since everything is stored in plain text and not in a database, you can easily use a version control system (such as Git) to keep a history of all your changes and easily share the source code of your site.
To create a static website with multiple pages, you can use a static site generator. There are a lot of static site generators, and I use Hugo (for a couple of reasons that I might write about some other time). With the use of Hugo—most other generators also offer this functionality—, you can code your navigation bar in a file, your footer in a different one and include both of them in multiple templates. These templates will then gather the content from your Markdown (or HTML) files, put it all together and output all the HTML files of your site. Now that I have an operative site, when I want to publish a new post, I create a file with some metadata and the post content, and Hugo does the rest. Post files look like the following:
---
title: "Post title"
categories: category
tags: [ "tag1", "tag2" ]
---
Post content.Thanks to Hugo, it is very easy to add content to a website, and the source code is neatly organized. Hugo also lets you minify the content to reduce file sizes—although some people might argue against it, I find it useful and some files get reduced by up to 30% (CSS files)3.
Since my recent exit from multiple services because of privacy terms concerns, I realized having a personal website can substitute social networks. I get to share anything I want on my own terms (and with my own theme!), ensuring privacy to anybody who wants to read, and I get to keep the copyright over my content. I now have my corner of the Internet, where everyone can find me, contact me and read what I have to share.