• posted on 12-07-2025

Years ago, the rise of social media diluted logical reasons to own and operate a personal website. Even though it was/is-still cost effective, websites can take a lot of time building and managing.
Wordpress helped many people hit the web running with a ready made cms complete with changeable styling templates. There was a few cms scripts like wordpress back in the day, some are still around like drupal. That script was typically the choice for federal contract gigs, as it used a different template system and routing that was/is more secure server side than the average wordpress install.

Was a lot to learn, even now. Looking around i find that host/startup made one click installers like wix are still a thing, albeit still terrible from a dev's perspective. And most of the younger devs are more npm json dependant, so most of their work is with the newer framework style js scripts. Those are much easier to learn, although the main overhead is getting acquired to the npm flow. As an older lamp guy that stuff still confuses me ngl lol. Worth learning though if you're into crypto as many blockchains use some flavor of json npm xyz. But be warned, that the json ecosystem and crypto at large are compromised at the package level, so explore the rabbit holes on that before you take it serious - unless you're more black hat etc etc.
One ting that really went crazy is domain extensions. There's a .something for .everything. In crypto its common for people to register .meme or .xyz domains for meme coin projects. Very cheap reg so typically people scoop as throwaways, just like the token the domain is related to lol. imo the old tld's will always be the ones to focus on when you're buying. the net, com, org, and sometimes .info.
i remember when .tv domains where common among tube site owners, there were many adult tubes pre-onlyfans era. webmasters back then would spend stacks operating those sites, from domain to server was top tier, just to push adult videos copied from 100 other sites lol. when gaming professionally came along for everybody with a console, .gg domains sometimes were used for agencies, sponsors and even streamers. During the pandemic i ran the campaign for a known streamer at the time, portfolio had every important domain extension, which gets expensive when renew hits lmao. Joke was on me too, as streamer was the type that took tip$ for eating boogers yet didn't care about web assets until i was gone. life weird like that i guess.

but be careful with crypto domain extensions as they're really just tokens, and make all your transactions poison-able and targeted. ask how i know lol. its cute in theory if you have grail ens or sns type stuff but people rarely buy or care after airdrops hit. I will note though, solana has the best domain extension thing going, no need to renew as you actually do own it, imagine that.

So yea for a long time personal ownership of a website was not justifiable to most folks. But me noticing something nowadays that wasn't really a problem years ago. That is, gate keeping. Take for example what happened to twitter, you have to login to see content. what if you are banned tho? erm bug or feature? what if its important news from a company i care about that does not have a blog? hello world..?
And its not just twitter of course, i remember when pinterest added the login popup to see more. In their case its more understandable as media content storage/bandwidth is huge/expensive. its also a weird feeling to remember when api access to apps was not such a big deal, was a free thing cause you still had to integrate code onsite. Once everyone became json compliant then it became a feature to lock out smaller devs/projects. instagram was one of the early ones to just say oh well, no api for you.
coding scrappers was fun but once the lockup of everything happened you had to get creative with authentication or just pay an authorized company for their third party tools/api connectivity to whatever site. Pre-pandemic i remember being grossed out by the way things were going, web didn't feel as free.

So, why leave social for the responsibility of owning and operating a website?

Well, real free speech, anon. i know i know, you love the trenches of hatred and criticism just to get banned anyway in the long run on social media. But imagine not getting banned or "permanently suspended" for posting how you feel about [insert topic].
since this isn't about financial stuff i can say this as advice, its a good idea get a website. and no not to make money on adsense lol, but as a therapeutic hobby that will teach you an invaluable skill-set. think of the web pages as your canvas, doesn't matter if you're a coder, writer or graphic type as you'll learn to see it as art. code is poetry, and free speech. you can literally name your objects, posts and files the craziest stuff and no one even has to know lol. your web host may know tho, depending on where whats hosted [lol].
we need more webadmins and webmasters again, less echo chamber frogs. with a little effort you can have a blog running in a day. avoid one click installers and spend a little time reading how to do it the full stack way, get to know the ways of each programming language, not just the npm and json flow. yes you'll want to know that too but be versatile in your server skill set. php and python are go to's for server side, but you'll want to know html and css first though. knowing vanilla html allows you to build a website from scratch without any dependencies, well aside from a web server if not local. i can rec learning vanilla javascript too, years ago jquery dominated things but after json frameworks dropped it kinda faded. What will never fade is plain ol js however. still, js is to be used with respect for yourself and the user/visitor. same with python and php.
you can use wordpress to quickly build your personal site, but i do not recommend doing so as it requires security hardening. i mean its easy to do but for new users its easily forgotten or overlooked. wordpress is still the most common cms and for that reason it gets attacked the moment it is installed. bots, crawlers etc roam the net looking wordpress logins to pop; they even hit this site despite there being no cms of any kind or database used. always check server logs if you can, dashboard hosts have a great ui that shows you everything. its possible to check logs via terminal but depends on host environment, ssh is usually turned off on small hosting packages.

one big question for most people is, what do i post or put on the site?
anything, anon... well almost anything allowed by your hosts tos lol. But, for guys/gals going the extra mile there are ways around that too if you're bout that life. For now tho we'll stick to the basic goal of getting a site hosted, with something on it.
take this site as a reference; i post articles about dev, culture and art mostly. simple interests, right? you don't have to be a writer or english teacher to blog. just freestyle and babble a bit about what you like or fav niche/hobby. Linking to stuff is easy content too, like youtube embeds. the redacted category on this site has mostly youtube embeds from a well know tuber that shows how some buildings may be older than we think and the floods/melts/hidden tribes etc type content.
when you mirror stuff be sure to have the og links and credit back to the og page for seo looping. helps people and web crawlers find content when you source link all your references/embeds/media.

Devs and commission artists usually make a lander for their portfolio, instead of using something like linktree. for devs github is commonly used as a loop but thats kinda boring, even if you do the custom github background thing. i've seen some newer coders attempting to connect spotify playlists on their landing pages but tbh it would probably be easier to integrate a youtube based solution. either way adding music is a good idea, think of reasons to keep people onsite, even if just for an 1 hour playlist. i went the winamp/webamp route like one my favorite token projects had, i still need to add more tracks and persistent mode so refresh doesn't equal playlist restart. small fixes and different skins go a long way. google is your friend for tutorials, don't forget, coding is a lot like art. don't be afraid to copy pasta what works, we all do in programming.
for cost you can get away with spending less than $20 monthly on a juiced shared account or baby vps. For new devs avoid vps unless you're already a terminal monkey from github. And avoid digital ocean as they may randomly ban you after signing up. Happened to me so yea it's thing... As a older dev i go dedicated when i can, avoiding those new cloud based thingys. the cloud flare bleed years ago kinda stuck with me on the potential for disaster with clouds. dedicated servers are kinda overkill for a personal site but if you have the time/money to tinker i rec dedi all the way. better tos, performance and you can host anything privately [kinda]. plus, you get a bunch of dedicated ip addresses on a dedicated server so imagine.

Things to look for; type of hosting account, is company a reseller? monthly cost vs feature list.
Companies to avoid; godaddy, ionos, digital ocean.
in closing, i probably will add more to this post. kinda rambled a lil but there's more to cover. But key take aways from v1: get a website, cause you can say/post what you want, don't over spend, and don't focus on roi in the beginning. Have fun and do you as always anon, ily. <3

• posted on 11-22-2025

heyyy, i see you, anon... out there pen testing this website. upon checking my logs i found an assortment of urls and what not being requested.
problem tis, those files and directories that whomever is pinging do not exist. well maybe one or two lol.

decided to update this post and take some screenshots. notice the post date vs pics. whomever is really busy requesting 404's. you may want to use the data to block from your servers too anon.
but sorry i don't use wordpress or any of the popular frameworks/cms thingys on this website. stonerforge.net is kinda boring i know know, not much here to poke at. web 2 is more fun than web 3 in that regard, more flexibility and security. no user data has to be hosted etc etc.

every few days they grab a few new ip ranges and proceed with the 404 spam. its a few tricks you can employ to address this type of traffic but a simple no condition works well enough.

have fun out there. i appreciate the interest you have have taken in lil ol' me...