Add a Meta page to your personal website

If you have a personal website, chances are, you take great care into making your site yours. You update it frequently, you might have a workflow for posting on your blog. You might have made sure to properly implement features you care a lot about.

What tools do you use to draft your blog posts? Where do you syndicate your content? What are some inspirations or standards you follow for your site’s design?

I love reading personal blogs, and I also love it when people talk about their site and blog themselves. Similar to movements for /uses and /now, include a /meta page on your website and write about your website itself!

Some people include information about their site in a dedicated section of their /about, or /uses page. That’s great too — the point is to share with others how your blog is made, how it came to be, and all other meta information you want your readers to know — if you haven’t written about the topics elsewhere, a /meta page is a good place to put it. Do you link to your site’s source code in the footer? This is a good opportunity to link it in a dedicated page too.

# Examples

Seirdy has a /meta page where they talk about:

  • Tools and services used to build and deploy their site
  • Other versions of their site — on Tor, on Gemini
  • Badges and website directories they’re part of
  • Links to other pages under /meta/, such as all the things they’ve yet to implement, accessibility and design choices, etc.

Kev Quirk has a section titled “Colophon” in his about page that includes:

  • His site design and inspiration
  • What his site is built on and what it runs on

Hund has a brief section in their about page where they mention:

  • What they use to make their site
  • Where their site is hosted, and a note about carbon footprints and (lack of) user tracking

Gregory Hammond mentions why he writes on his blog on his about page, he also has a list of policies he follows including:

  • An accessibility statement
  • An AI statement
  • A Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions

icyphox has a section named “colophon” in their about page that mentions:

  • The site is self-hosted
  • The site is built with a custom static site generator
  • Fonts used throughout their site

My personal website contains a /meta page that includes:

  • How my site is built and where it is hosted
  • Features and standards my site adopts and ones I’m yet to implement
  • Where and how I write blog posts
  • Website directories, webrings, and badges

Now it’s your turn! If you’ve been blogging for a while you may have come across common questions such as people asking about the tools you use to build you site, or how you host it. You can now simply link them to that page :)

Questions, comments? Send an email to my blog-post mailing list (with plain text) or to me privately.