Sometimes you need to connect with other people.
You have a website because you want to say something or share something, even if all you want to say or share is "look! I have a website!" If you've put that website online you probably want other people to see it. Maybe not! Maybe it's a personal, private diary and you're using the internet to store it offsite! There's been many a LiveJournal used that way.
But you might need a place to PUT your website, or blog. You might want a way to send your words to other people. You might want people to be able to easily find you.
- What is hosting?
- Hosting is the service that hosts your website, blog, gallery, etc. You can do this on your own computer hooked up to the internet but that's not a super common choice. Hosting can be pretty expensive but there's a handful of free options.
- What is a blog?
- A blog is a Web Log or diary that's hosted online. There's a handful of sites that are specifically for blogging as opposed to being general personal sites or galleries or what have you.
- What is a webring?
- A webring links together themed sites like beads on a necklace. You can travel from one website to the next until you loop back around to the site you started with, assuming the amount of sites is small enough or you have enough time.
- What is a newsletter?
- A newsletter is a sort of email digest with what you've written that a service sends out on your behalf.
- What is an RSS Feed?
- An RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication," is essentially a news aggregate. If you have a blog, webcomic, news site, or other site that updates you can set up an RSS that people can subscribe to with an RSS Feed Reader. It makes it much easier to read updates, especially when they're sporadic.
- Webring World has a great deal of information about webrings - what they are, what the history is, etc.
- Onion Ring is a tool to make webrings.
- Webring Starter Kit, which will help ease you into making webrings, uses Eleventy and Netlify
- How To Make A Webring; uses Github, Jekyll, and Netlify
- Buttondown is a nazi-free newsletter service.
- Ghost offers website and newsletter aids.
- Github Pages offers hosting.
- Neocities offers free, and ad-free, hosting. There's also a premium subscription model.
- Nekoweb offers free hosting.
- Beehiiv is another nazi-free newsletter service.
- Dreamwidth is LiveJournal-style blog & community hosting platform. It's ad free and user supported and the owner/operator is in the trenches fighting for user privacy rights. There's great controls over who can access your posts, and there's communities to join (and create).
- Blogger is a hosted blog platform. It's one of the old ones!
- Zonelets are tools to make a blog that you host yourself and have greater control over than a blog hosted elsewhere/using Wordpress.