What is the design of your dream personal blog?

Mine would definitely be designed in dark mode, and minimalist. It wouldn’t allow comments. I’d probably have a suggestion box though so readers could suggest things they’d like to read or see, or for feedback. I’d probably not worry about Twitter Cards or Meta Tags or share buttons etc because if I was blogging it would mainly be a writing hobby for myself and so maybe having one or two engaged readers would be what I would want, rather than a mass following so I’d not be interested in social media.

I think what you put on your blog has to match what you think is appropriate to your target audience… if you have a target audience.

I’m too lazy to actually start a blog, but I do sometimes like to write, and I like to post it somewhere, into the internet abyss of random anonymous shit posting…

I guess it depends on what the goal of your blog is. If you’re only using it as a vehicle to let your thoughts out or scream into the void, there’s probably no need for comments or sharing. If you care about your content getting seen, however, you’ll need to do SEO optimisation which is sometimes stupid and brain-numbing (recipe websites put their grandma’s entire life history before the actual recipe because it keeps readers on the website for longer, which means it shows up higher in search results; clickbait-y titles like “10 Reasons Your Partner Hates You” or “How To Do So-and-so, Updated 2024” will get more clicks and move themselves up the search page). So a blog that starts off as an innocuous photo dump might end up looking more like YouTube’s homepage: titles and photos that are vague enough to pique interest, but mind-numbing content that makes you wish you’d never clicked; a heavy emphasis on liking, sharing and subscribing; and eventually, ad sponsorship. Personally I hate this type of content, so if I were to start a blog I would pay for an ad-free website out of pocket or use something like Substack.

It would look somewhat like proboards/PHPbb forums, maybe a little more frutiger aero-esque.

All my design elements would be mostly meant to look like 98 to 2005 tech when blogs took off.

There would be no endless scrolling anywhere, everything would be paginated. I'd have Web Share API buttons but mostly just rely on the sharing features in the browser.

You'd post your posts as threads, and those threads would have all the usual tagging and calendar view stuff one might expect a blog to have, and you'd be able to use HTML/CSS to theme at the blog or individual post level, and use hyperlinks.

You'd be able to download everything you posted, and move it to another instance if it went down , which would be important since I wouldn't be hosting it myself in this perfect world of blogs

Everything would be digitally signed, so you could import someone else's posts from a different server if you wanted to comment or just archive them, and they'd appear as they originally did, verifiably unchanged.