On building a home on the web (III)
September 8, 2026In June of last year, over the course of nine or ten days, I built the first version of the site you’re reading now. I moved it off Framer because I wanted to feel in control again; the canvas is great for design, but it never felt right for building a website. I started my career as a front-end developer, and no-code tools still feel to me the way Dreamweaver did back then. Fifteen months on, I’ve taken stock.
The Journal, which I assumed would be the heart of it, has been quiet: I’ve published a dozen posts or so, six of them written in a single week at a writing residency in the Pyrenees. Some of that I’ll blame on the year I’ve had—a stretch of contracting, then joining Enode full-time, and an art book to write and edit. With so many projects going on, writing about the work tends to lose out to doing the work. But, I’d still like to lower my bar for publishing, and train that muscle.
daniel.pizza
On the Links page, my blog of sorts, I’ve published eighty-five new links since the launch, on top of the fifty-five that were already there. The page had lain dormant for five months before that; then sixteen appeared in August alone. Having a new space I enjoyed working in restarted the habit.
I spent most of the year extending what I’d started. I built a Library for the books I’ve read, and wired it up to my monthly recommendations on Trema, narrowing the gap between my two sites. I found my way back to RSS for reading the authors I follow online, and made sure my own site had one cohesive feed on offer, too. Less visibly, I regrouped the Journal by year, moved to the variable cut of Degular for proper italics, and rebuilt the image processing, so the site now weighs well under half what it did.
And, this week I added a Photos page, as my photos were the last thing I still handed over to somebody else’s feed (Instagram). I’d rather they lived here, in an order I chose. More on that soon, in a separate post. The homepage is under construction, too. A new version is on its way.
I keep coming back to the links I published, though. After the August peak the pace settled: two or three a month since the new year, sometimes just one. I read that as a failure of discipline at first, then decided it’s a realistic rate—how often I come across something worth keeping or sharing. Four a week was the enthusiasm of a new toy. Two or three a month I could keep doing for a decade.
And that, I think, is the appeal. A timeline on social media asks you to keep talking at the speed of everyone else’s attention, but nobody has all that many thoughts worth sharing. A page you own doesn’t punish you for going quiet through February, and it doesn’t reward you for posting eleven times on a Tuesday. It just holds whatever you put there.
Some of the older links I’ve put up date back to 2022. They’re still sitting at the same addresses—while nothing I posted to Twitter survived, and not only because of the platform’s demise. Even at the platform’s healthiest, a post had a useful life of a few hours before it fell through the floor of the feed. My archive was technically present, but practically unreachable, even for me.
Then, this spring, an email arrived. A teacher who runs a graphic design and coding bootcamp had three students putting together a beginner’s guide to web design for the rest of their group. Somewhere in their research they’d landed on my Links page, and found it useful enough to ask her to write and say thank you.
That’s the whole point, really. It’s one thing to drop a resource into a social feed; it’s another to have a page where it stays, where three students can find it months later and pass it on in a guide of their own. I learned most of my trade the same way, twenty-odd years ago—browsing from website to website, day after day. It’s good to remember the web can still work like that, if you let it.
Matthias Ott made a version of this argument in 2019, in Into the Personal-Website-Verse, and has kept making it since. His case isn’t only that you should own your corner of the web; it’s that these corners should point to one another. That the acknowledging, and arguing, and building-upon we outsourced to timelines can happen between sites instead, one link at a time.
matthiasott.com
He suggests keeping a links section for exactly this reason: find a good thought on somebody else’s site, write about it, link to it, and over the years you’ve built an archive for yourself and for anyone who wanders in.
For a while I thought of my links as the filler between real posts. He’s right that they’re the connective tissue. Roughly five hundred people read the things I collect every month, and now and again I find a link back from somebody else’s site. The site ebbs and flows, but it doesn’t lie dormant. It’s one more corner of the web that somebody keeps on purpose.