Checked 29 September 2026
Cool personal blog examples, and what to steal from each
Why this list is different
Most "personal blog examples" lists are the same list. Travel, food, parenting, finance. Niche blogs, picked because they get traffic. That answers "what should I blog about?", and I wanted the other question. What could my site look like? How could it actually work?
Then there are the numbers. Traffic figures, income figures, no sources at all. A lot of these lists push hosting affiliate links too, and plenty still have "2021" in the title, so redesigns happen and the list never notices.
So this one's different. Each entry is a personal site, picked for one idea you could take for your own. Just one. You don't need to copy a whole site; you need a thing.
I opened every site and checked it on 29 September 2026, and each entry describes the site as it was on that date. I only name a stack where the owner says what it is, because guessing from the outside is how wrong facts get about. Numbers that change daily, like streaks and post counts, are left out. They'd be stale before you finished reading.
Sites that are the interface
Josh W. Comeau
CSS and React tutorials built around live, interactive demos, with a sound toggle and a dark mode switch in the header. Each visitor can press a post's like button up to 16 times. In his own words: "This blog has no discovery algorithm, so it serves no purpose other than being cute."
Steal this: add one small, useless-but-delightful interaction that makes the site feel handmade.
Stack (his own write-up, How I Built My Blog): Next.js App Router, MDX, Linaria, Shiki, Sandpack, MongoDB for the likes, and PartyKit for a shared real-time feature.
Bartosz Ciechanowski
Each article explains one physical thing, such as GPS, a mechanical watch, a bicycle or the Moon, through draggable, slider-driven 3D demos. He publishes rarely, and the archive shows that depth can beat frequency.
Steal this: explain one thing you know properly, with one diagram the reader can drag, instead of ten quick posts.
Nikita Prokopov (tonsky)
The site is bright yellow by default, and turning on dark mode gives you a torch: a circle of light follows your pointer around a black page. From December to February it switches itself to a blue winter mode.
Steal this: make dark mode a joke or a mood rather than a colour swap, or give your site a seasonal skin.
Lynn Fisher
She redesigns the whole site every year, and the archive keeps every version from 2007 to 2025, most with a case study. The 2025 version asks what a responsive fixed-width site could mean: resizing the window squashes and stretches a narrow, paperback-style column.
"I guess until I just don't want to anymore" (2025 case study, on how long she'll keep doing it)
Steal this: keep every version of your site online and write one post explaining each redesign.
Rauno Freiberg
The homepage is short: an introduction, a seven-line manifesto that starts "Make it fast. Make it beautiful.", and links to his Craft and Field Notes pages. Previous versions stay live on year subdomains, such as 2022.rauno.me and 2023.rauno.me.
Steal this: write your design principles as a few lines on the homepage, and park old versions on year subdomains.
Brittany Chiang
A two-column layout where the name and section links stay fixed on the left on large screens while experience and projects scroll on the right. A "Click to time travel" link, with a spinning TARDIS, takes you to her previous version.
Steal this: link your old site from the new one as a playful easter egg.
Stack (her footer): designed in Figma, coded in Visual Studio Code, built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, deployed with Vercel.
Neal Agarwal
The homepage is a grid of small, one-idea web projects, including The Password Game, Infinite Craft, The Deep Sea and Draw a Perfect Circle. There are no blog posts; the projects are the writing.
Steal this: if you build small things, make the homepage a shelf of them rather than a list of posts about them.
Nicky Case
Interactive essays and games such as The Evolution of Trust and Adventures with Anxiety, made "for curious & playful folks". Everything is released into the public domain (CC0), with an open invitation to "reuse & remix it in your blog or classroom".
Steal this: put an explicit, generous licence on your work so teachers and bloggers can reuse it.
Gardens and working notes
Maggie Appleton
The homepage calls it "A collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time", split into essays, notes, patterns, smidgeons, a library and an antilibrary of books she wants to read. Her essay A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden describes the seedling, budding and evergreen labels that many gardens now use.
Steal this: label posts by how finished they are, not just by date, and publish an antilibrary.
Stack (her colophon): Astro, MDX and Vercel.
Andy Matuschak
Public working notes that he says are "mostly written for myself", shared "as an experiment". Clicking a link opens the next note beside the current one, and each note shows what links to it.
Steal this: publish small notes that link to each other, and show "linked from" on every page.
Gwern Branwen
Sidenotes in the margin instead of footnotes, hover popups that preview any link, collapsible sections, and icons that show where a link goes. Pages carry confidence and importance labels, so readers know how seriously to take them.
Steal this: tag each post with how confident you are in it.
Stack (his design page): Hakyll and Pandoc Markdown on a dedicated server, with custom popups and sidenotes. He also keeps a Design Graveyard of features he abandoned.
Formats and rituals
Simon Willison
Separate streams for long entries, short links with commentary, quotations, and TILs ("today I learned"). A companion site, tools.simonwillison.net, collects small HTML and JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs, which he calls "an experiment in prompt-driven development with very low stakes."
Steal this: split your output into formats of different weight (link, quote, TIL, essay) so there's always something small you can post.
Stack (his about page): a custom Django application with content in PostgreSQL.
Matt Webb
A London blog running since 2000. The page shows a live count of consecutive weeks with new posts, and a recurring "Filtered for..." series of themed link roundups.
Steal this: show your weekly posting streak on the page. It keeps you honest.
Jason Kottke
"home of fine hypertext products since 1998": several posts a day of links with short commentary, and the site says it is made possible by member support. The footer claims it is "Beloved by 86.47% of the web".
Steal this: a one-line joke in the footer does more for your voice than an about page.
Julia Evans
The homepage opens with "Here's every post I've ever written, organized by category", covering networking, Linux, Git and debugging. Her illustrated programming zines grew out of the blog and sell at Wizard Zines.
Steal this: make your homepage a full archive grouped by topic, and turn your best cluster of posts into a small zine or PDF.
Paul Graham
Around 200 essays on a plain index page whose HTML still uses table layout and a spacer GIF. Nobody minds, because the essays are the point.
Steal this: the design can be 1998 if the writing is good. One index page of titles is enough.
brr
"My Antarctica blog!", written anonymously by someone who worked at the South Pole station, covering its water, power and internet. It spans a 446-day stay and ends in July 2024, so read it as a finished project.
Steal this: a blog can be one finite chapter of your life, with a clear start and a clear end.
Owning your corner
Derek Sivers
His /now page carries a dated "updated from" line naming where he is, and tells you "if you have your own site, you should make one, too." He started the idea in 2015 and runs nownownow.com, a directory of people with /now pages.
Steal this: add a /now page with a dated line saying where you wrote it, and list it on nownownow.com.
Jeremy Keith
One site, in Brighton, holding everything he posts: journal entries, links, notes and articles, with a running count of each on the homepage. It's the IndieWeb habit of publishing on your own site first and syndicating elsewhere.
Steal this: publish on your own site first, then share out to social platforms.
Aaron Parecki
His homepage mixes articles and notes with check-ins, sleep entries and rides, and he says he has been tracking his location since 2008. He is a co-founder of IndieWebCamp.
Steal this: post one piece of data about your life automatically (a walk, a book, a ride) so the site stays alive between essays. Think hard before publishing your location, though; that's his choice, not a default.
Manuel Moreale
Alongside his own writing he runs People and Blogs, an interview series with people who keep personal sites, including Derek Sivers and Chris Coyier.
Steal this: interview other bloggers on your blog. It builds a network and gives you something to publish.
Writers who run their site like a studio
Robin Sloan
The novelist's newsletter "goes out every 29 ½ days", a lunar month, and a separate lab blog takes the topics that are too nerdy for it. The site says it "aspires to the speed and privacy of the printed page."
Steal this: pick an odd, memorable publishing rhythm, and state your privacy stance in one sentence.
Stack (his colophon): Middleman, with Buttondown for email.
Craig Mod
Two newsletters with different jobs: Roden, monthly, on photography and literature, and Ridgeline, weekly, on walking in Japan. A membership programme, SPECIAL PROJECTS, pays for almost all of the work.
Steal this: split your audience by rhythm (a weekly short thing and a monthly long thing) rather than by topic tag.
This site: I'm biased
jstov.uk
jstov.uk is mine, so it goes last and it's labelled. Take everything here with the right amount of salt.
The homepage is a board. You drag it to explore, and you scroll or pinch to zoom. The lighting follows the real time in London, which is the bit I like most. After dark a shooting star crosses the board, and if you catch it, it opens something you haven't found yet.
Press X and you get x-ray mode, which shows the workings underneath. Blog posts get cover art generated from the post itself, so nobody's picking a stock photo of a laptop. There's also a "Solo AI dev in 60 seconds" tour if you'd rather be walked round than wander.
The words are drafted through ScriptGrain, my own product, in my voice, and then fact-checked, because a draft is only a draft. A Cloudflare worker serves crawlers real HTML, and there's an llms.txt. How it all runs is written up on the colophon.
Steal this: tie your site's look to your city's real clock. Let the light change when the light outside changes.
FAQ
What makes a personal blog stand out?
One idea the reader remembers: a format, like Simon Willison's TILs; an interaction, like the torch that replaces dark mode on tonsky.me; or a ritual, like Lynn Fisher redesigning her site every year. Paul Graham's essays still sit on a table-layout page.
Should a personal blog have a /now page?
It is a cheap way to keep a site current between posts. Derek Sivers started the idea in 2015 and describes it as what you'd tell a friend you hadn't seen in a year. Put a date on it so readers know how fresh it is.
What should I put on a personal website?
Who you are and what you are working on (an about page and a /now page), your writing in a findable order, a way to follow along such as RSS or email, and a colophon if you want other builders to learn from it.
Do I need to post often?
No. Bartosz Ciechanowski publishes a small number of deep interactive articles, each explaining one thing. A rhythm you can keep beats a burst you can't.
What is a digital garden?
A personal site of notes and essays that grow over time rather than a dated feed. Maggie Appleton's garden labels pieces by how finished they are, and Andy Matuschak publishes linked working notes.
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