Build your own website (0m30s)

Sophie (web engineering lead at Monzo, owner of localghost.dev) opens with the talk's whole thesis: build a personal site that is yours, not the corporate-pattern site with hero, CTAs and feature grid, but a space that's a reflection of your personality in HTML, CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript.

"a space that is entirely yours, a reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS, and a little tiny bit of JavaScript"

"in the early days of the web there were a lot of sites like this... it was really fun, and it was a great way to connect with people with similar interests"

"it feels like we've lost this decades-old art form"

The web today is owned by a handful of companies (4m07s)

Most of the websites in the room get paid to build are transactional — marketing pages, e-commerce, blog posts retitled "Seven Reasons Why" because it converts better — and the web most of us use is a small set of properties owned by a few companies. The fun web is somewhere underneath.

"I die a little bit inside every time I [add a tracking pixel]"

"I had written something for BuzzFeed instead of a company blog"

"chances are it's a set of websites owned by just a few companies, and the web has become really centralised"

Social media: we are the product (5m09s)

The Terms of Service are explicit — you own your content, but the platform can reproduce, copy and distribute it royalty-free. You moderate yourself to please the algorithm, you write tweets pre-empting the backlash, and if the platform decides you broke a rule (or might have), you lose your account, audience and content with no recourse.

"ultimately they aren't really social platforms at their core — they are advertising platforms"

"you find yourself moderating yourself, and you aim to please your audience"

"MySpace very, very famously lost 12 years' worth of data in 2019 — just gone"

A history: GeoCities and the early personal web (11m18s)

The free web-host era: GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire. Family pages, fan sites, hobbies. Sophie's own start was a "Make Your Own Website" kids' book and the Notepad-and-tables school of HTML, plus a Petz fan site. The whole archive is on archive.org if you want to feel old.

"GeoCities offered this mapping of the real world to a virtual one in the form of neighbourhoods"

"this is Make Your Own Website: a Guide for Kids — it taught me how to write my HTML in Notepad and build layouts using tables"

"certainly don't write HTML in caps anymore"

Neopets and Web 2.0 (14m25s)

Neopets was the cultural phenomenon where a whole generation of web developers learned HTML — to customise shops, profiles and guild pages — and it was followed by Web 2.0 blogs (B2, Grey Matter, Movable Type, WordPress), LiveJournal, Open Diary, and a community of personal-site creators where having your own domain name was a status symbol.

"I built a GeoCities website for my Neopets guild, and I started making graphics to share"

"there was a real emphasis on community in this space... helping others learn HTML"

"the real vibe of these websites was 'this is my space on the internet, but here's something for you'"

MySpace, Facebook and the great centralisation (18m35s)

MySpace turned the personal web into a profile-shaped object: an About-Me page, status updates instead of blog posts, a Top 8 instead of a links list. Facebook removed the CSS customisation entirely. Together they pulled almost everyone off their own domain — and we still haven't recovered.

"your About-Me page becomes a profile page; your blog posts become bulletins and status updates; your links page becomes a friends list or a Top 8"

"Facebook didn't allow customization at all — every page just looked like Facebook"

"there was that weird period of time where if you weren't on Facebook, you didn't get invited to any events"

When the personal web died (21m12s)

By 2010 Sophie had stopped building sites for fun. The blogs she did try were monetisation-shaped — a make-up blog hoping for PR samples, a food blog she got bored of in six months — and they were focused on the reader's engagement metrics, not on the writer's enjoyment. Bootstrap and Squarespace made every site look the same.

"as a creator, the internet for me had become about engagement — and if I wasn't getting any engagement on these websites, what was the point?"

"if I couldn't make a website look like a glossy magazine, there was absolutely no point having one"

"if I hadn't become a web developer and fallen in with a crowd of cool people who had their own website... I wonder whether I would ever have made a website again"

People bringing it back (24m18s)

A tour of contemporary personal sites that are visibly personal: Cassie Codes' SVG animations, Sadness's button makers and shrines, Lynn Fisher's responsive thing-that-happens-when-you-resize, Alistair Shepherd's Firewatch-inspired time-of-day colour-shifting, David Darnes' speaker icon, Kara's CSS-grid layout, Carol's keyboard fan page.

"Cassie has incredible SVG skills... lots of fun web effects as you move the mouse"

"Sadness's website... real '90s/noughties vibes from the site, lots of content for the visitor to use on their own website"

"Carol's got a whole page dedicated to her keyboards and tech setup, which inspired me to do my own keyboard fan page"

IndieWeb, Yesterweb, and a path forward (27m28s)

The IndieWeb movement formalises Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) with Webmentions wiring cross-site replies back together. The Yesterweb movement leans into nostalgia and creative-hobby-first websites. Both are responses to the same problem; you can take what's useful from each.

"POSSE — Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere"

"Yesterweb... has a huge emphasis on building websites as a creative hobby — and I absolutely love that, because that's how it started for me"

"websites don't need to look like GeoCities to be good websites — we should take the principles of those days, namely that anything goes"

What to put on yours (31m05s)

Whatever you want. Theme switcher, single-joke useless website, list of recipes, blog about tech, photos of dogs. Pre-emptively use the experimental CSS-only-in-Canary thing. Resist sending newcomers to React for a single page. Build the basics in plain HTML and the fancy stuff is a progressive enhancement everyone except you can safely ignore.

"build something completely pointless — this is my favourite genre of website in the whole world is the useless web"

"experiment in production, write bad code, ship it, see what happens"

"make it fun, make it pointless, but most importantly of all, make it yours"