More voices joining the chorus

[claudeb]

How silly of me. I joined this community, made a first post, then promptly forgot about it for over a month. (In my defense, I spent the holiday season reviewing content management systems of a newer generation.) But look what I found among my browser bookmarks from last month: an opinion piece titled We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites. Which essentially says that all those little home pages we used to make on services like Tripod were often kinda childish and crappy, but that didn't make them any less valuable. Also that the problem lies not with social media itself, but our exclusive reliance on it. In the author's own words:

My original sin wasn’t making a Facebook account, it was abandoning my own website that I controlled [...]

And yes, that seems to contradict the title. But if our conclusions don't surprise ourselves sometimes, it means we're not thinking hard enough.

I have at least a couple of friends who went through the trouble of making personal websites in recent times, one of them twice, despite not being web developers, and not knowing HTML. Which limits their options, but otherwise is perfectly legitimate. It's up to programmers like me to make it easy for them. And as it turns out, many have done so already. It's just a matter of sifting through the mud to find the gems.

What to recommend everyone is another story. Typical shared hosting accounts powered by cPanel often come with Softaculous. That's a daunting selection of over 400 web applications, unless you have a guide (somebody write one). But did you know it also includes a website builder similar to those offered by Webstarts or Wix?

There are more options out there than you think, even for non-technical people. Tell your friends.