I built a blog

It’s been a long time since I’ve had an active personal blog. Like so many others, I’ve mainly relied on various forms of social media and managed services. But given the way social networks seem to be breaking apart and the communities I typically interact with are scattering, it feels like it’s time to return to owning my own little corner of the web.

The web is unique in this regard: anyone can register a domain and be an owner, rather than a tenant.

Tobi from Shopify made a great point at a recent event. Roughly paraphrasing, he said: “If the browser were released today as a new app, it would never get accepted into any of the app stores. It’s simply too powerful.”

This is why the web is so important: it’s the one chance we have at a truly open platform where you make the rules for your own little corner of the internet.

And the barriers to building on the web keep going down. When I first got started, setting up early blogs required a huge amount of technical know-how, and maintaining them was a significant time commitment. Then blogging platforms and social media replaced that with cookie-cutter setups that might offer the ownership of bringing your own domain but not the deeper control you get from building your own thing.

This blog was built almost exclusively through prompting. It started with a bolt.new prompt that spun up a simple Astro-based blog deployed to Netlify, followed by a few tweaks here and there with Cursor and Windsurf.

It’s still obviously well within the realm of geekery and tinkering, but with a surprisingly low barrier to entry.

Over the next few years, AI will continue removing barriers to custom-building your own projects. We’ll see the power of what an individual can create in their own corner of the web increase exponentially. This will hopefully inspire more people—especially future software developers—to build a fully custom online presence rather than renting space on someone else’s platform.

Emerging protocols like the AT Protocol powering BlueSky will, with luck, let all those custom corners of the web connect to each other, bringing the benefits of sharing and discovery usually found on large social media platforms to our own sites and apps.

I’m looking forward to exploring these topics—open web, AI, new federated standards—and all the composable tools and building blocks that make creating new things even more fun and approachable.