Build your own blog and get discovered through webrings

When I start building something, it rarely comes out exactly the way I imagined it. I'm not sure whether that highlights poor planning skills or just the way things are: It's impossible to really know what a thing will be used for. I think that's really beautiful and exciting. Especially when it's about a project that people and communities will use.

With paperboat.website, it largely turned out the way I wanted. In the beginning, I was planning a global feed where all blogs on paperboat.website are aggregated. I quickly steered away from that idea because I don't want to make any site owner feel like they have to participate in the social aspects of the platform.

I used to post about my projects on Instagram and Twitter but those platforms were either sold to people I'm not particularly fond of and/or became so algorithm-heavy that I didn't feel like my posts reached the people that were really interested in it (not even my followers). So i stopped posting there and built my own blog. It was going well and created a theme I really liked but updates made it hard to maintain. Posting also wasn't the greatest experience: I had to create markdown files with a specific frontmatter, commit and push to a git repo. For me that's far too much friction. I just want to be able to hit new post and start writing.

Another pain point I saw were mutlilingual sites. A friend was setting up a beautiful website about a sail boat in danish, english and german and WordPress gave him (and me) the hardest time setting it up correctly. We had to hack PHP code, create CSS hacks and in the end it still didn't work right. Updating pages in multiple languages also was a nightmare.

All of this frustration with web publishing amounted and I decided to create this platform.

Webrings really change how paperboat.website works. Instead of a global feed that's controlled by popularity (upvotes) or some kind of algorithm, you can just pick a topic and explore websites in your own pace. If you find a blog you really like, follow it and maybe check if it's also in other webrings. Hop onto other rings and continue your journey there. Go down rabbit holes, always knowing that you actively chose your path of exploration.

On the other end, the absence of an upvote system also makes the platform much calmer for writers. I especially enjoyed receiving emails from like-minded people who discovered my blog naturally. That's exactly the experience I intended for paperboat.website, too.

If you're ready to try it, create a site, create a page about you, maybe write a blog post or two. If you feel like sharing your thoughts, join a webring or even create one yourself and invite your friends to it.

paperboat.website is the place for your writing, your projects, your ideas. For you and all the readers who are there because they're actually interested in what you're talking about.