Someone said to me once, in an email, that personal websites are dead and the blog is taking over. Is that really true? I know that blogs are the in-thing these days, along with Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. And I'll admit, I have a blog (and a facebook!), called indelible.nu. But I sincerely hope that the website is not dead, just sleeping.

In my opinion, blogs are boring. They are easy things to make: all you do is find a webhost that will take Wordpress or Greymatter, or Joomla etc. or get a free one. They provide templates for you and you can find thousands of extra ones all over the net. Some folks design their own and do a really good job too. But mainly, they're the simplest way to build a generic website. Sadly, few blogs have interesting content. There are the well-known ones where new content is eagerly sought after, but most blogs are cut-and-paste jobs, with a little "what I did today" content inbetween endless memes and photographs of their cat. Which is fine, but not when they are touted as replacing real websites.

The women's groups tried to bring websites alive, and the sad thing was that all of those groups eventually folded from lack of interest. I blame the blogs again for that, especially the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube. They allow instant updates of nothing really in particular. It's the triumph of the mediocre; everyone reduced to boring, dull, inoffensive nothing. And yes, I write this when I have a Facebook, Twitter etc. So it's not as if I have not tried them. I just cannot see the point of them, when personal websites, with lovely, well-chosen graphics and pages of content are being shoved out for their dull sake.

So please, don't do it! Get a blog by all means, but please do not abandon websites. For sheer fun, from building them to visiting them, they cannot be beaten by anything else the web has to show us. For the sake of creativity and originality, if nothing else. This is why I am rebuilding some of my sites, in the old-fashioned style of personal websites that I loved from my time in women's groups. My problem, though, is that I seem to fit into no particular group. I dabbled in the kind of personal sites that are made by the fanlistings community. But the majority of those website owners are teenagers or very young woman. It's difficult, but I suppose that my answer is to just build the kind of sites that I like. End of rant!