This Talk Is Under Construction: A Love Letter to the Personal Website
summary
Claim: the personal website is resurging as a radical, creator-first antidote to centralized social media, and it’s practical to build one that’s accessible and performant. Demonstrated tools and techniques: modern CSS (custom properties, P3 color), generative SVG, view transitions and progressive enhancement, and a theme switcher that loads without JavaScript and respects reduced motion. Concrete examples and platforms: Geocities-style playful sites, Neopets-inspired learning, directories like NeoCities, a now page automation, and MySpace’s 5 million users by 2004 as context.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Personal websites intro
- 1:04Why build your own site
- 2:26Loss of fun on the web
- 3:51Modern dev stifles creativity
- 5:16Cost of social media
- 9:49Why sites disappeared
- 10:50Brief history of sites
- 15:44Shift to consumer focus
- 21:19MySpace and Facebook impact
- 25:53Decline in 2010s
- 26:35Modern site examples
- 29:13Building a site is radical
- 30:56What to put on your site
- 33:20Tools and hosting
- 35:04Rediscover old web magic
- 36:48Build your own site
- 37:31Q&A
