Embracing the personal web

Welcome to the new rasmusroy.me, this is the first major update to my website in many years. In this article I will explain, why I’m bringing it back, giving it more love and embracing personal websites.

If you are in the situation like me where you want to create your own website / blog, here are some behind the scenes of what I did and why.

First, the why

Like many others I’ve been a big user of social media for many years. It started out early on in my teen years and has followed me ever since then.

For many years it was a beautiful thing, I’ve always loved online spaces where people could share their creativity, I loved to be able to stay in touch with all my friends as we changed schools and moved around the country and it also made me feel connected enough to not have any doubts about packing up my life and moving to a totally different country.

However like many many others I also see the extreme harm social media has done myself and our society. The platforms that used to connect us have now been weaponized to divide us and stoke the flames of our consumption.

Social media has long lost its sense for me. It no longer is for keeping up with friends, but now mostly brands and mostly everything is content to be consumed mindlessly.

Concious consumption

I have so many people that I want to follow, people who I care about or people who create art I genuinly enjoy, but the way you are being forcefed ads and things you don’t need is making it harder and harder to do with a positive attitude.

As the feeds get flooded with ads, influencers which I would say is essentially spam, it becomes harder and harder stay focused and concious of the things we want to consume and enjoy.

I can hardly count the times I’ve looked at a photo or work of art, thought “nice” and just scrolled away from it a second later and then it’s out of mind. This does not seems like the way anyone want their hard work to be enjoyed.

Websites give the creator a way to express themselves that is not bound by the limitations imposed by existing platforms. They are powerful because they are a space where creativity can exist and be enjoyed without the influence of algorhitms.

Tech

When I set out to build a site I did it with a couple of criteria.

1. Simple to set up and maintain.
2. Allow me to post markdown based posts / articles.
3. Fast, minimal and can be updated from everywhere.

Like many other developers I have a hard time keeping myself from trying new technology for low stakes projects. I’ve been a React developer for many years and while I really enjoy working with it I also know that it can come with a lot of boiler plate and unessesary things.

Since this is just a project for myself I decided to try out Svelte. Because of Sveltes integration with Vercel, I knew it would be easy for me to build a simple website that I could easily deploy and maintain with just Github and Vercel.

This would set me up for a workflow where I can:

1. Develop / write anywhere and on any device
2. Push the changes to Github
3. Deploy it with Vercel for free.

Markdown is a markup language for formatting text and many platforms support it, on of these are Notion which I still take a lot of notes in. These notes can then be formatted as blog posts and be exported as markdown essentially giving me an easy way to create blog posts from notes / writeups etc.

Luckily for me there was a markdown preprocessor for Svelte called mdsvex. This would allow me to easily publish markdown documents as blogposts and even use markdown to format other content pages.

Final words

I’ll be writing another post detailing more of the code setup of this website. It’ll be both a reminder for myself as well as a guide for others in how I set up this website. So more on that soon.

I hope this post shed some light on why I’ve decided to build this site. There will be more discussions to come in the future about these topics, it is one that is of great interest to me and I see the status quo changing slowly and more people embracing putting their personal touch on the internet in a different way again.