Personal Blogs and the Small Web

The beating heart of the internet has also been people just sorta putting things out there.

While social media platforms fight over engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, people are rediscovering something that feels almost radical to some: owning their own little space on the web.

A Brief History

Personal blogging exploded in 1999. That year alone saw the launch of Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga. Suddenly, you didn’t need to know HTML or FTP to have your own website. Blogger, created by Pyra Labs in August 1999, introduced permalinks, permanent URLs for each post that made sharing and linking trivially easy. Google saw the potential and acquired them in 2003.

The early 2000s were the golden age. By 2004, an estimated 12,000 new blogs were being created every day. WordPress and TypePad launched in 2003, giving people even more options. People wrote about everything: their lives, their hobbies, their thoughts on politics and culture. Blogrolls (lists of other blogs you read) were everywhere, creating webs of discovery long before algorithms decided what you should see.

Then social media happened. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram made sharing easier but at a cost. Your content lived on their platforms, subject to their rules, their algorithms, their whims. The format and shape of posts became theirs to define and the choices of that design were defined by engagement. Content became shorter, more trivial and reactionary. Livejournal posts turned into Facebook posts turned into Tweets turned into reactions.

My Journey

I started blogging in high school on Blogger with a site called GHBRA (the Georgia Homeless Bike Racing Association). It was just me and my friends driving around every weekend to sleep on couches or in dirty motels to ride bikes, eat burritos, and generally explore.

Later came Helton Technologies, essentially a portfolio website for the projects I did in college, with posts about different experiments, papers, and tinkerings.

Then willmcginnis.com, a bit of a gap, and now this site. Each iteration was a way to think through ideas, share what I was learning, and have a permanent record of where my head was at different points in my life.

Why People Still Blog

Despite the dominance of social media, people are returning to personal websites. The reasons are surprisingly consistent:

Ownership and Control: Your content is part of your identity. Having it on your own domain means you own it, control it, and can keep it as long as you want to maintain the domain.

Learning and Growth: Writing about what you’re learning forces you to understand it better. Many developers maintain blogs partly as documentation for their future selves, partly as a way to demonstrate their skills and thinking to potential employers or collaborators.

Creative Freedom: No character limits, no algorithm deciding who sees your posts, no pressure to perform for engagement metrics. You can write 100 words or 10,000. You can experiment with format and style.

Connection Without Extraction: Personal blogs create genuine connections between people who share interests, without the extractive business model of social platforms trying to maximize your attention for ad revenue.

Finding the Small Web

The challenge with the decentralized web is discovery. Without an algorithm serving you content, how do you find interesting blogs? There are real questions about this in the world of generative AI and SEO vs GEO.

I’ve found that simply cross-posting on socials is sufficient to get to the sort of audience you actually care about (presumably, people you may be in network with on socials), but there are dozens of interesting projects currating directories of small web sites for just this reason:

ooh.directory - Started in 2022 by Phil Gyford, this collection includes over 2,300 blogs about every topic. It has categories, search, and shows recently-updated blogs.

Ye Olde Blogroll - A humanly curated list of over 1,000 personal and independent blogs that are regularly updated. No algorithms, ever. Sponsored by Micro.blog.

IndieWeb - More than just a directory, IndieWeb is a movement and community focused on owning your online identity and content. Their wiki has extensive resources on everything from setting up your own site to implementing webmentions.

Search My Site - Lets you search across independent websites, with sites ranked higher when they have no ads or tracking.

RSS Readers - Of course, the classic way to follow blogs is still viable. Tools like Feedly, Inoreader, and self-hosted options like FreshRSS let you aggregate feeds from all your favorite sites. No algorithm, just chronological updates from sources you chose.

You can add this site to your RSS feed with: https://mcginniscommawill.com/index.xml

The Future is Small

Throughout the 2020s, something has slowly shifted. The decay of Twitter (or X, or whatever), the increasing enshittification of platforms prioritizing engagement over everything else, it pushed people to rediscover what the web was supposed to be. Whether it be true nostalgia, or fear of loss, it’s something I’ve seen talked about more now than before.

The small web isn’t going back to 1999. But we can take the good parts, like ownership, creativity, genuine connection, and build them with modern tools. Static site generators like Hugo make it easy to have a fast, secure site. GitHub and Cloudflare Pages offer free hosting. The barrier to entry has never been lower.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, there’s never been a better time. Write for yourself first. Write to learn, to document, to think through problems. Share it because someone else might find it useful, or interesting.

The web is better when it’s made by individuals. One blog post at a time.