Why a personal site still matters
A sample essay about writing slowly, on a domain you own, in an internet that would rather summarise you.
Example content. Sample article so the site is not empty. Delete this file when you publish.
A personal website is an unfashionable object. It does not grow followers by default. It does not ping anyone when you publish. It will not summarise itself into a carousel. It is, at best, a quiet URL that you keep in working order.
That is precisely why it is still worth having.
A place that does not expire
Feeds are rented. A social profile is a page on someone else’s product, formatted for their incentives, subject to their ranking, and one policy change away from becoming a museum. A domain is a slower kind of address. If the software underneath this site were replaced tomorrow — another generator, another host, a folder of Markdown copied from an Obsidian vault — the URL could stay the same.
That stability is not nostalgia. It is a practical feature of thinking in public: you can link back to yourself. You can change your mind in a later note and point at the earlier one. You can let an argument sit for a year without it disappearing into a scroll.
Speed is not the same as thought
The internet is now very good at producing a first draft of an opinion. Models summarise, autocomplete, and rephrase. That is useful for errands. It is a poor way to notice what you actually believe.
Writing an essay by hand — even a short one — forces a different pace. You have to choose a sentence that can survive being read twice. You have to decide whether a claim is yours or merely adjacent to something you read. You have to sit with the uncomfortable middle of a piece, where the outline was tidy and the paragraph is not.
This site is meant for that slower register: longer articles when an idea needs room, and shorter notes when it does not.
What belongs here
Not everything needs a public URL. Some thinking is better left in a private notebook, or in a conversation, or unfinished. The test is simple enough:
- Would I want to find this again in five years?
- Is it specific enough that a stranger could disagree with it?
- Does publishing it make the thought more honest, or merely more visible?
If the answer to the last question is only “visible”, it can stay offline.
A small technical opinion
A personal site should be boring to operate. Static files, no database, no analytics, no font loaded from a company that is also an advertising network. If the site cannot be copied onto a USB stick and served from a machine in the next room, it is more complicated than it needs to be.
The rest is taste. Line length, paper colour, the weight of a heading. Those are not decorations on top of the writing. They are how the writing is offered.
There is a book I have not written called A public notebook. The title is enough for now.
This sample exists to show typography, Markdown, tags, and an Obsidian-style wikilink. It is not an essay by Pierre Blanchet.