Add a Meta page to your personal website
Update (2024-11-11)
I’ve made a webring! Read more about this topic at meta-ring.hedy.dev
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
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
Jeremy Friesen has a Colophon page that details their journey in blogging with links to blog posts for each major change in the website. He even has a dedicated changelog page.
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 :)