Little websites everywhere
Michelle Barker’s post is relatable to a personal homepage enthusiast like myself.
Building a website feels old-fashioned these days. How many more websites do I have left in me before the old fire flickers and dies? Is snuffed out. Before making websites is no longer a viable way to earn a living? The web will change drastically within my lifetime, maybe someday soon, indeed it already has. Maybe it really will fizzle out, a graveyard haunted only by bots and crawlers. But I have a hunch that there will be a long tail. Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads. Making fun websites, helpful websites, pointless websites (the best kind) that serve no purpose other than to manifest someone’s spark of creativity.
It’s hard for me to imagine the fire ever snuffing out. My sites have never been hugely popular and I’ve never had a large audience except for blips and spikes here and there. But that’s not why I have a website. I make blakewatson.com for myself. I do it so I can copy a link and send it to a friend. I do it as a record of my thoughts and passions. I cherish the small amount of visitors I do have and the occasional email I receive about something I wrote. The long tail is real. There are real humans out there who just want to enjoy each other’s websites.