Why start a website?
There are a few reasons why I am starting this website / blog.
Opening doors to self-expression
The ways I can express myself in the modern age are increasingly limited. Most social media sites nowadays emphasize short, visual content with a strong emphasis on feedback systems such as likes and comments.
Starting a basic, independent blog allows me to escape from all of that and gives me freedom to create what I want to create.
Comprehensiveness
Many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. -Neil Postman
What I post on Instagram reflects the 1 per cent of my life when I have encountered something visually interesting, yet what I write here is what I go through daily: ideas that I have developed and refined over countless hours.
Sustainability
The contents of this website is written in markdown and largely textual – it could easily be preserved and parsed. I could switch up the architecture that supports this website should it become outdated or unsupported.
With social media sites, attempts to preserve or parse content are nightmarish. Social media sites come and go. To be at the whim of those companies would be unwise.
Decoupling the internet
Right now, the “internet” to a majority of the population is just an assortment of a few sites – Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon … I don’t think this is what the internet should be. Everybody should have an individual presence on it, beyond a couple of accounts in those sites.
If you’re interested in starting one yourself …
This website used to be hosted for free by GitHub pages with a free domain provided by Github. You could check out the extensive documentation. I highly recommend making your first website this way.
I should also mention that while Wix / Squarespace / WordPress are options for starting a webpage, I believe you’ll just be stuck in the same cycle but one level higher. To my knowledge, it’s basically impossible to transfer the website you made with proprietary software anywhere else.
About a year into blogging, I decided to register a domain for this website, tobylam.xyz, through Cloudflare. I’m also using Cloudflare pages to host the website for me for free. You can find more technical details about this website at this continuously updated page.