A case for a personal web

22 Jan 2025

As I take stock of the year past and what lies ahead, I'm reminded of the comfort of having a stable digital home here. Even having neglected the website the last few months in the face of immediate work pursuits, I know that there is very little chance of anything going astray. The pages are light, almost entirely static, and do not lean on 'fast tech' to survive, which has come to consistently disappoint through either aggressive updates or price hikes.

A personal web space combined with a robust offline alternative can have a wonderful impact on your personal resilience and presence on the web. Nothing we create on the web has permanence - and this year showed that even the most established of institutions are open to collapse. Much of the old web is decaying in light of monopolistic services owning fundamental services such as blogging or social networking. These services maximise profit at the cost of integrity and you. Even the pages I type on could disappear if the domain breaks, the server shuts down. However, because these pages are written and stored in an agnostic file format, it really doesn't matter whether I use Grav or any other CMS to serve them. As long as i have some kind of offline backup, it takes no more than perhaps an hour to build everything back up again.

Digital reflects reality - and we become more disenfranchised year on year when we give over control & trust to organisations that can close the shutters and take the money, with no consequences. Even the Internet Archives, nobly fighting against web decay, is a vulnerable service, a threat to organisational powers who don't want a recorded history.

If there's nothing else you do as a writer or creator - consider the benefits of positioning your work for ownership & quick recovery. It's a life skill that becomes only more crucial as future tech continues to race towards an unsustainable outcome.