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The biggest thing I enjoyed about the internet of the 1990's was the fact that there were so many personal websites out there. Whether if it was some college group maintaining a website or if it was someone maintaining their "Meet my family" webpage. Some webpages/websites turned out to be quite interesting, and it was like a treasure hunt uncovering these sites. Others were, well, not so interesting and down right hard on the eyes! Still, I would spend hours on Yahoo just searching all of the personal webpages that made it to Yahoo's directory.
So with that said, is there anyone out there, today, who still maintains a personal webpage? Or are we all sucked up into Facebook world? I'm not talking about personal blogs or websites that are store fronts, but webpages/sites that are "just for the heck of it"? I guess you'd call them, "Just for fun" webpages?
CenturyLink no longer offers personal web pages. Even when they did, they did not offer FTP so you could custom make web pages with HTML code written in Notepad. As a result, I never had a web page with them.
I had web pages with my previous internet provider. I finally dropped them when it became obvious that they would never offer anything other than dial-up in my area.
I have one that I set up like that. It has all kinds of random things. I did it just for the heck of it since I had the web hosting for my other websites so I figured that adding another for personal, whatever use would only cost me the price of the domain so I created it.
I need to work on it some more and it has been up and running for about 6 months. Due to the time I have to put into my other websites I don't have as much time to put into it as I would like.
I think many people are just so into Facebook, Twitter, Google + that they don't really do that many personal sites anymore. I used to do the same as you and sometimes you would just come across a cool site that I enjoyed. Today there are just so many of the exact same thing that you don't often find something cool / unique.
I built one for our house.
3968Vrain.com
Will make it easier when we sell in 20+ years.
Well I have to admit I have never registered a domain and built a website for my home. If I did, I would probably PhotoShop some pics of the house to make it look smaller and have some that looked like the house was growing up. Kind of like how people show pics of their kids when they were younger and more as they grew up.
I understand why the majority of folks would rather do something like Facebook rather than to take time out to maintain a personal website. It's convenience, and the technology allows them to stay connected with notifications and apps on portable devices. But, I do miss the old days. Thank goodness that we have the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive site to allow us a chance to go back in time. I often visit there and will put in Yahoo's address so that I can go back and look at snapshots from 1996. You can still access many old pages linked off of the old Yahoo site.
Another thing I missed about "personal" webpages (and maybe the old software as well) was that there were many websites that provided "unofficial" plugins for popular programs. For instance, you might stumble across "Gary's Site of Unofficial Eudora Plugins". Where as, nowadays, if it isn't an "official" site like Sourceforge, you wouldn't want to trust downloading plugins and software from some off the wall site.
Back in the 90's, I created my own personal site of interests. It was a very eclectic website. Anything from music to wrestling, to pictures of my favorite actresses, to personalized SouthPark characters, etc....Not much of it had to do with who *I* was, but just my interests. And of course, you had to have a guestbook so that you knew if your site was being seen or not. I got a lot of compliments on my site, and I enjoyed maintaining it. The problem was that the company who maintained the site sold out (Xoom.com), and I thought I had lost the website. And later on, I created a new website and wanted to get into building websites for people, but I didn't stick with that. Being young and dumb and not very business savvy, I got taken for a ride by my clients. And of course, as website design improved and got more complicated, I didn't stick with learning the newer technology. Fast forward to today, I'm much happier as a Sys Admin.
I'm thinking of building another site, but a simple, straightforward site just for the heck of it. Nothing fancy, just for fun. I don't see any site I build as a moneymaker, but just something to play around with when the wife is watching TV!
My personal site has been up for 17 years. It's not completely current, but most of it is. Started off as static html, then a frontpage driven site, then various CMSs and homegrown scripts and now it's running Wordpress. It's always been hosted on my own hardware.
For many years, I had a portion of my personal site dedicated to a forum for discussing & criticizing a national big box chain. Lawsuits were even filed over that one. Ahh, the good old days, when I had enough time, energy and lack of anything to lose to be able to do stuff like that.
I write a new blog entry a few times a year, at most, and they're mostly technical articles & howtos. I don't use social media very heavily, and that includes sharing my life on my website. If I were more into that sort of thing, I would publish most of what I write on my own site, and then share it wherever I wanted, which is basically what I do now.
There are still jillions of personal sites out there, but you don't see them anymore because the search engines don't serve them up in the results (they're not the sites people are typically searching for) and the use of social media and photo sharing sites instead of hosting has surged.
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