This Talk Is Under Construction: A Love Letter to the Personal Website

Remember Geocities? The unbridled creativity and questionable colour schemes of a bygone era. There was a time when websites existed as reflections of your personality or a shrine to your favourite band rather than carbon copies of a Facebook page or Twitter feed. Content wasn’t algorithmically curated, but shared through links pages and webrings. With today’s browsers and modern CSS, we have at our fingertips so many powerful APIs and tools to build the most incredible, beautiful and wonderfully pointless websites that have ever existed, in ways that are accessible and performant like never before. And in the wake of Twitter’s slow demise, the humble personal website is rising from the ashes. This is a manifesto for building something just for the fun of it, and a rallying cry to tell your story on a platform that’s entirely yours.