A Year of Owning My Corner of the Web

A year ago today, I started turning this site into my own corner of the web.

I added an About page, a /now page, a values page, a uses page, and a colophon. I added places to write about books, software, leadership, and whatever else I was thinking about. None of it was especially complicated or novel. I had simply made a place of my own.

I did not know whether anyone would read it.

I still don't, at least not in the precise way an analytics dashboard could tell me. This site has no tracking scripts. I cannot tell you how many people visited last week, which posts kept their attention, or whether a graph is moving up and to the right.

I have come to think that is part of the point.

What filled the first year

I started by deciding what kind of place I wanted to create. Pages about my values, the things I use, what I am doing now, and how the site works gave it an identity beyond a collection of posts.

After that, I wrote about whatever had my attention.

I wrote about stepping away from social media, moving from Apple to Linux, and choosing privacy over convenience. I wrote about professional journaling, productive walks, and choosing books over the internet. I documented my attempt to read every Hugo Award-winning novel and a project that turned my movie library catalog into physical pages for an A5 binder.

Work became another thread. Posts about steel threads, Kanban, and RFCs grew into writing about leadership: making expectations explicit, setting priorities, creating calm, and learning to lead without pretending to have every answer. Writing those ideas down made them easier to share with people I work with and forced me to make the ideas more concrete.

Then there was C2K.

I built and released a small Android app, published it through F-Droid and Google Play, and wrote about the choices behind it. That project gave me new things to learn and a series of ideas to explore: open source, privacy without telemetry, release automation, and the value of software that does not need to become a business or a platform.

Along the way, the site itself kept growing. I added search, tags, an RSS feed, email subscriptions, related posts, better accessibility, and other small improvements. The site became both a place to write and another thing I enjoyed building.

Looking back, I did not follow a content strategy. I followed my interests. More than thirty posts later, those interests have started to form a record of the year.

It would still be worth writing

Even if nobody read this site, writing it would still be valuable to me.

In that sense, the site works like a journal. It records what I was building, reading, learning, and thinking at a particular moment. It gives me a reason to stop and turn a half-formed idea into something clearer.

Writing for publication asks a little more of me than leaving a note to myself. I have to explain the idea well enough that another person could follow it. I have to decide what I actually mean, find the gaps in my thinking, and remove the parts that do not help. Even if another person never arrives, imagining a reader makes my thinking better.

The result is also a record for my future self.

I can return to an old post and remember not only what I did, but why I did it. I can see where I changed my mind. I can recover details I would otherwise forget. Sometimes I discover that an idea I thought was new has been quietly following me for years.

A journal does not become worthless because nobody else opens it. Neither does a personal website.

But people have read it

The pleasant surprise is that this has not been a private exercise.

I have shared posts when they helped explain an idea better than I could in a message or conversation. Other people have shared them. People have found my work, read it, and reached out to talk about it. The site has made it possible for an idea written at my desk to be useful to someone I may never have met otherwise.

I know that not because a dashboard counted them, but because some of those people told me.

That is not a complete measure of readership. Most people will never send a note, and I am sure many visits leave no trace at all. But not knowing exactly how many people read something is different from nobody reading it.

The feedback I do receive feels meaningful because it begins with a person, not a metric. Someone found an idea useful enough to mention, question, or share. A small number of those connections can matter more than a large number on a screen.

A place to point to

Publishing here also gives my ideas a durable home.

A social post belongs to a feed. It appears, competes for attention, and quickly disappears beneath whatever comes next. Tomorrow or years from now, someone can still find a post on this site. I can revise it, link to it, and build on it without asking an algorithm to show it to people.

That has been especially useful as I have written about C2K. A small Android app led me into questions about privacy, open source, automation, and the joy of building small software. Those ideas belong together, and this site gives me room to explore the connections without turning them into content for a platform.

The website and the app come from much the same impulse: make something useful, keep it understandable, share it with people, and do not demand more from it than it needs to give.

You can own a corner too

I think more people should have a personal website.

It does not need to become a brand, a business, or a publication. It can be a few pages about who you are, what you care about, and what you are working on. It can hold photos, project notes, book reviews, long essays, or short updates. The shape only has to work for you.

Most importantly, it gives you a place you control.

No algorithm decides whether people see something. No feed surrounds your work with outrage, advertising, or whatever keeps people scrolling. You do not have to make every idea provocative enough to earn engagement. You can write something thoughtful, publish it, and let it wait quietly until the right person finds it.

I do not have a comments section. People can email me, but sending an email is different from dropping a reaction beneath a post. It asks someone to pause, address another person, and start a conversation. I have not found those conversations to have the casual toxicity that comment sections and social platforms can encourage.

That small amount of friction is useful.

Cost does not have to be a barrier either. GitHub can store the site and its history, and Cloudflare can build and host it on a free plan. A custom domain costs money, but remains optional. With the address provided by the host, a personal site can cost nothing beyond the time spent making it.

That time can be as small or as large as you want. Start with one page. Add another when you have a reason. The goal is not to recreate a social platform by yourself. Make a place on the web that answers to you.

Please reach out to me if you want help getting started. All the source for this site is available on Github.

Success without a scoreboard

Without analytics, I cannot optimize this site for traffic. That frees me to optimize it for something else.

Did writing the post help me understand the idea? Will I be glad to have this record later? Could it be useful to one other person? Did I enjoy making it?

Those are modest questions. They are also enough.

The internet makes it easy to confuse visibility with value. If a piece of work does not travel widely, it can feel as though it did not matter. But reach is only one kind of impact, and often not the most important one.

Writing can be worthwhile before it finds a reader. Publishing simply leaves the door open for someone else to walk in.

One year later

A year later, this site is still small, quiet, and mine.

It has become a journal, a reference, a workshop, and a place I can point people when I have something worth sharing. It has sharpened my thinking and connected me with people who chose to spend a little time reading what I wrote.

I do not need to know how many people are reading to know that both things are valuable.

For the second year, I want to keep following the same approach. I will write when I have something worth working through or sharing. I will keep documenting what I build and what it teaches me. I will keep improving the site when doing so is useful or fun.

I do not have a growth target for it. I have a place I want to keep tending.

That is enough reason to keep writing.

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