Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

From Lincoln Michel’s “Surf’s Up in Slop City,”

If the old institutions are crumbling, that is also the perfect time to build new ones. I’m not saying this is easy. But, what choice do we have?

This is response to the Washington Post gutting their book coverage.

Building our own networks and platforms to promote books, or music, or art is hard, as mentioned above, but who else is gonna do it? And if we don’t, the vacuum will be filled by the next venture back techbro operation, then we’re right back to where we started.

Start a website around something you love. A blog. Buy a domain name (affiliate link). Reach out to my buddy Tom to set up a WordPress site.

Write about the things you love in the way only you can. Don’t worry about getting traffic yet. Update the site every day. Every week. Month after month.

When people discover you, it’ll feel like finding a magical bookstore down a moss-covered alley with string lights, the opposite of a flashy ‘content hub.’

Jazmin Jenay started HATTIE MAGAZINE, a “Black TV & Film PRINT magazine because I want generations after us to know who we are, and what we created beyond the digital timeline.”

“After working as a social media manager for the past few years I became extremely digitally fatigued but I couldn’t force myself to log out. The next casting, next connection, next opportunity most likely rested in me scrolling my thumb on social media. That left me wondering — what will they know of us if the apps shut down tomorrow? We need something that can be held, a physical record of our brilliance.”

Wow, this line: “what will they know of us if the apps shut down tomorrow?”

This is why we build websites, start magazines, and build creative communities. Yes, setting up a website is hard, but so is starting a magazine! We do these hard things because they are worth doing.

As Casey Barber said in a recent Escape Pod call, having a website is, “an investment in your sovereignty, and your autonomy, and your you-ness, honestly.”

This question came up on a recent live stream: “how to make your website your hub with AI taking traffic away from us little people?”

For the last 15 years we’ve been putting our best work on every other platform than our own. It’s no wonder that people don’t think to look up our websites, right?

So let’s start.

Start putting your best work on your website. Make it the one source of truth on the entire internet.

If you’re still on social media, tell people to visit your website (but manage expectations). Put a link in your newsletter. Put it on a flyer with a QR code.

Then get YOUR biggest fans on your email list, or tell them to follow via RSS, so you’re reaching them directly regardless of what AI does with your public content on a search engine.

Get YOUR people used to the idea of looking up YOUR website, because even though AI might scrape your work, it can’t build and nurture relationships. It can’t inspire them to keep coming back for more. That’s your job.

On Chelsea Riffe’s In My Non-Expert Opinion podcast, KP Pilley (Ask Jupiter) mentioned Social Media Escape Club (!!!) when talking about the risks of depending on social media to reach your fans.

“I know Seth Werkheiser, who is on Substack and the Social Media Escape Club guy, he has his own RSS feed, so like anytime he publishes anything it like comes to the RSS feed, and I think lives on his website which I like really like as well, and kind of is echoes back to like the old days of the internet.”

This was the second time today I heard RSS brought up, and I am loving it —check out the full episode here.

Today I discovered dominosugarfactory.com, a site built by photographer Noah Kalina. The site features his film photographs of the Domino Sugar Factory building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from 2008-2013, along with his current photos when he visits his old neighborhood.

I also found rekall via Rodrigo Ghedin, which he describes as “a fairly dose of cyberpunk aesthetics.” Upon further investigation, the rekall site has been updated every night by Steve Gaynor since 2010.

I made a “Website Walk” video based on the new Gourmet Magazine, too, which I found out about via Kottke. Turns out Condé Nast didn’t renew the trademark on the magazine title, so some foodie writers bought it up and relaunched it.

This isn’t a matter of “what’s old is new again,” but rather “what worked, worked.”

Keep your domain name current, and pay your hosting bill every year, and your work survives when a platform goes down, kicks you off, locks you out, or gets bought by Yahoo (we all know how that goes).