Let me tell you a short story. There was once a time before people figured out that they could make boatloads of money designing for “engagement” and building dark patterns into everything to maximize how many eyeballs would look at ads and for how long, building algorithms that sucked the fun out of “surfing the web” and just making people angry.

It was a time when the Internet was often slow, flaky, ugly, and lacked much in the way of diversity, but it did have one fantastic thing. It was mostly people just building websites for their own enjoyment. If other people came along somehow and found them, wonderful!

Fortunately, that old “small web” still exists, and is actually much bigger than ever, despite being overshadowed by “the socials.” Generally, the best way to find the best things to read are by following links between small web sites. However, to get started, some search engines specialize in indexing them, such as wiby, or STRACT with one of its fantastic optic filters like “Indieweb,” or Kagi small web.

Hams are great examples of people who still post things about their hobbies to personal homepages. Sometimes blogs, sometimes simple Web 1.0 homepages, whatever. Feel free to poke around some of the ones below from hams I know or have come across:

• Jon KM8V
• Vince VE6LK
• Brad KN3B
• Stephen W8BSD
• Diane VA3DB
• Jeff NT1K
• Rob N8RH
• K4FMH
• Dan VK3DAN
• KB6NU
• David VK5DJR
• Jon KM8V
• Alan K0BG
• Jay NQ4T
• W4GOP

Want your personal homepage added? Send me an email at my callsign @locklin.science. I’ll build up a larger list as part of a page of resources and interesting links. I recommend adding such a list to your own hobby homepage, as it lets readers find interesting sites without a search engine.

About this Website

The site is built with Jekyll by github actions automatically on every change to markdown files, and based on the Lightspeed theme. I like static websites, as there are lots and lots of free hosting options that are long term stable (because the hosting resources required are almost nil). I build another static web page for my professional site using Hugo. In that case, I have to actually “build” the site locally on my computer before pushing it to the host, but that is a minimal effort (one command and a few seconds processing time). Those tools just make nice themes - it’s just a bunch of HTML files.

Don’t fall for anything that puts ads or watermarks on your site. It’s your space. I only pay for my domain, and if I decide I don’t want to use github pages to serve the site anymore, I can easily move it to another option that is free or nearly free (I own the domain, so the URL of the website doesn’t change). I have a VPS and could self-host as well, but for a static website, it’s more likely to stay available for years to come if it’s not sensitive to my system admin skills or experimental whims. I may embed dynamic elements hosted on the VPS, but the main content should be ultra-low maintenance cost and effort to last basically forever.