10 ms·

A Love Letter to Personal Websites

204 points by devbas 7y ago

pelagic_sky 7y ago
What's interesting about this is Tobias, the author, earns a living making an awesome skin for wordpress called Semplice. I've been using Semplice for the past couple years and as a designer who used to code, it makes making my portfolio site a heck of a lot easier. There's still a lot of time sunk into it. I just don't have to fuss with some of the details. So in theory, he helps me keep my personal site alive, even if I am now using the crutch of WP.
verisimilitudes 7y ago
I agree with the general idea, but dislike the WWW. I find it fundamentally poor from the start. I'd rather make the comparison to having one's own node on the Internet. I rent a server and I rent several DNS names. Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet. Through this, I'm able to host a website, a Gopher hole, a Finger service, my own email, and I'll host FTP, IRC, and other things as I want to. There's not much of a limit. This is nice and freeing. I decide how everything's presented and done; I use my own server software in some instances. I can agree that having one's own website is an introduction to this manner of freedom, though.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet. It’s one of the more resilient platforms out there, at least considered to company-hosted social media sites.
boobePhuu7iet7i 7y ago
Loving the irony of having links to Instagram and Twitter in the footer of that post :P
- sushid 7y ago
  Not to mention as someone above mentioned, that the guy makes a living selling WP themes.
teddyh 7y ago
More than two years ago, I wrote this: […] What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine. Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising. — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456
- pier25 7y ago
  Facebook is the industrialization of personal information which has its pros and cons.
- knzhou 7y ago
Rafuino 7y ago
Finally bought myself a personal domain but am now currently agonizing over how to design the damn thing, let alone what to actually put on there!
- neilv 7y ago
  You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5): <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>Rafuino's site</title> </head> <body> <h1>Rafuino's site</h1> <p>Welcome!</p> <p><i>Under Construction</i></p> </body> </html> It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on gray, but you could CSS that in. :)
  - kylek 7y ago
    You forgot <blink> and <marquee> (and some sick midi tunes)
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      You forgot <blink> and <marquee> (and some sick midi tunes) Thanks to CSS animations, you can recreate <blink> and <marquee>. I use it to recreate the Amiga's Guru Meditation Error when I'm debugging web sites.
      - shantly 7y ago
        I had a legit use for a marquee a few months ago and couldn't find a jank-free way to actually re-create all of its features. You can get the basics but even that sucks compared to just using <marquee> (heavier, more code).
      - kylek 7y ago
        Oh, I'm very aware (I actually do use those tricks on my personal page. Unfortunately I left out the midi. And of course it's loaded with stolen gifs from gifcities[0]) [0] https://gifcities.org/ https://gifcities.org/
pier25 7y ago
For the past 4 years I've been too busy and have only written a couple of articles on Medium[1]. Thankfully I'm ending my current job which has consumed my time, energy, and soul for far too long and I want to get into the habit of writing again. This time on my personal site, not on Medium. [1] https://medium.com/@Pier https://medium.com/@Pier
- whitehouse3 7y ago
  I’m glad to hear we’ll see more of your writing. I dove deep into front end frameworks after a lot of research last year. Your clear and thoughtful comments about React helped me a lot. Congrats on making a positive career change.
  - pier25 7y ago
    Thanks for your nice comment, I really appreciate it.
joelrunyon 7y ago
In an effort to get people to bring back the blog, I started https://startablog.com https://startablog.com - to do just that. We actually offer to set up people's blogs for free here - http://startablog.com/free-blog http://startablog.com/free-blog (and are hoping to help 10,000 people do it). I know WP blogs are not always the favorite of the HN crowd, but Wordpress has been super accessible (esp for newbies) once things are setup, so hopefully we can remove that first (slightly technical) obstacle for the crowd that's used to doing something on everyone else's platform.
neilv 7y ago
One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc. My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve URLs for some open source contributions. It's also personal, with none of my professional work on it. I'd bet the vintage look has cost me a few business opportunities, but not every aspect of my life has to follow this year's commercial fashion. Shoot me if I ever give my little personal site a stock React look, or a big dynamic anti-Web framework, or third-party CDNs to mitigate bloat hosting costs, or something like that. :)
- state_less 7y ago
  I really enjoyed the look of your site and hope you don't trade it in for another cookie cutter site like so many others.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Cheers on the note “my professional work isn’t here”. Makes me wonder if I should be more explicit like that. I have to side with you on this. And I do use those modern frameworks at work. My goal was to keep mine working coherently in Lynx, but uses some JS for syntax highlighting and a click event or two that degrade well enough. It’s also an awful hacked together static-ish blog in Go behind Nginx. I was working on an improvement last night and realized how much I’d learned since I wrote it. It’s funny and frustrating at the same time. Might be time to start over again.
  - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
    I spent years rebuilding my site several times over, trying to appear as professional and modern as possible. A while back I got fed up, spent about 15-20 minutes writing some basic html, and came up with a simple page. I haven't looked back since. https://danielvaughn.github.io/info/ https://danielvaughn.github.io/info/
Kye 7y ago
Something even more pernicious about social media: if you build an audience there, you're trapped. You can easily convince yourself a lot of people care about what you say right up until you link to something more substantial off the silo. The ActivityPub fediverse is a lot better about this, but even there I might get one visit to a linked page for every ten boosts. Getting people to look at a website in 2019 is hard. It used to be easier. I could get 1000 people to look at a blog post on just about anything. Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away. You might get lucky and land on a long tail keyword that Google ranks you for, but search traffic is unpredictable even if you go out of your way to research keywords. I get 140k views a month and tons of retweets/likes on Twitter when I'm active. The website has a few posts with some search traffic, but nothing like 140k.
- movedx 7y ago
  > Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away. This is very true. I've got a YouTube channel and I'm developing premium training solutions on the side of it in Podia... video is king. People want high value (to learn something) wrapped in high quality and compacted into a 5-10 (max) minute video. And they want it for free... sigh. Remember, though, that Google is the #1 search engine, so blogging (and SEO) is still important to drive traffic towards your videos. That being said videos will take over. I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I believe it said in the next 5-10 years at least three billion people are coming online and they want video, because video is how they want to consume knowledge. I think people should start picking up a camera.
  - Kye 7y ago
    It sounds like you're talking about one specific kind of content: educational material. That's not what I make or have any interest in making. And there is no way I'd get on camera even if I wanted to do video. I do not believe video will come to dominate such that text and audio won't still have a place. I personally can't get much out of most non-fiction videos, and I know I'm not alone. I didn't even watch more than 0-2 YouTube videos a month until I found ContraPoints and got pulled into lefttube.
crustacean 7y ago
Can anyone give advice about how you built your personal website(s?) while having strong professional interests in multiple areas? I’d be really grateful to see an example. I have a career in tech and also a career in music. My professional networks in these areas don’t overlap. I don’t think everyone responds positively to the dual career thing, although some definitely do. Just make two sites and don’t link them? Get a stage name vs a tech name? Create a unified portfolio as a creative technologist?
- umvi 7y ago
  I use a static site generator called Hugo. All my web pages are markdown and Hugo turns them into HTML and applies a theme I chose. Great for if the content on your site is all static. umvirate.com
- ryacko 7y ago
  Only if you want your professional interests to be separate. Just have one web page dedicated to your tech portfolio, and another web page dedicated to music. Or even a whole section of your website. Or have two separate websites hosted on the same IP address or not. Personally I prefer PHP and using includes for menus, footers, or sidebars.
- ewams 7y ago
  I wrote my own in php years ago... ewams.net Most of the things I post are not directly tied to my current job but more of things I am interested in, like the cpu sizing tool I wrote http://ewams.net/specintd/ http://ewams.net/specintd/ or web scraping, security, data integrity, etc. Just something to store my research in really. Just get started!
- maverick2007 7y ago
  I did something a similar except instead of music I'm a huge theme park fan and wanted a portion of my personal site to be dedicated to my trips (instead of hosting the pictures on Facebook or the like) so I decided to separate out the roller coaster portion of my persona and put it at a subdomain of my personal site (https://coasters.joshimbriani.com https://coasters.joshimbriani.com for those curious) whereas my main site remains mostly tech focused (https://joshimbriani.com https://joshimbriani.com). I've been pretty pleased with the setup for now seeing as how I can nerd out about coasters without alienating the other half of my (non-existent) audience
podviaznikov 7y ago
There are so many cool personal sites out there. I'm constantly amazed by the quality and creativity. I publish now from dropbox. Ofc using my own tool https://docs.montaigne.io https://docs.montaigne.io. It's already helped me do add content more freequently
- ambivalents 7y ago
  This looks cool, thank you very much for sharing. However, I tried signing up and got an error message from Dropbox: "This app has reached its user limit. Contact the app developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to increase their app's user limit."
  - podviaznikov 7y ago
    Ok, enabled Dropbox for more users. You can try it now, if you want!
    - ambivalents 7y ago
      Giving it a spin. Thank you!
aledalgrande 7y ago
I think (hope) in the next years we will see an increase of personal sites. With products like Ghost, it's easier for everyone to make one and it doesn't involve a ton of coding. You can focus on the content and own everything. I wonder if we'll be able to connect these personal sites together like a crowdsourced Medium? Edit: I'm talking about self hosted Ghost
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mirimir 7y ago
I've done many personal websites, and the discussion forum or two, over the years. And more or less without exception, the lack of engagement has been disheartening. But (of course, I guess) most of them were Tor onion sites, so silence was predictable. But even on clearnet, promoting personal websites is nontrivial. How does one do it?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Put things that would interest others, and let others find it. If you’re feeling brave, you can link to it in an appropriate context. For example, in this thread sharing my own personal website might be relevant: https://saagarjha.com https://saagarjha.com
Rerarom 7y ago
At least in academia the tradition is still going strong.
- ht_th 7y ago
  Unfortunately, with the advent of electronic learning management systems and corporate content management systems in universities that are as much as required to be used, this seems to be declining fast. Currently I work as a lecturer at the same university I studied at twenty years ago. Then, almost every teacher and researcher did have their own website behind "~username" on the open web. For most it was just a list of publications and courses they taught. For these courses they often made an overview page with links to all kinds of interesting material, from lecture notes, old exams, literature, to tools, thoughts, and curiosities. Some went all out and made a personalized personal web page with all kinds of interesting content. I spend a lot of time browsing and reading and exploring these pages when I was a student. Now I wished I had downloaded them all. Now, no-one but some old-timers do have a "~username" web page. Courses and their materials are hidden away behind the walls of the learning management system we use. Their publications are visible via the library's repository and bibliographical system. For the rest, everything that is on the open web on the university's servers is published via the corporate content management system with rules and regulation what and how to post and most employees do not have access to edit anyway. Many researchers are part of some academic social networks like researchgate, but that's outside the scope of the university's servers. What is left is for those who are interested to share to setup their own websites elsewhere. Not many do, unfortunately.
  - Rerarom 7y ago
    Yup, I've noticed that too. Even worse, some younger people would consider it to be a tremendous burden to write their own HTML/CSS/JS.
unicornporn 7y ago
> written from years of thinking on the subject While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of personal websites, this post did nothing for me. So many words and so little to add. These texts are slightly related and did something more: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my-website-is-a-shifting-house-next-to-a-river-of-knowledge-what-could-yours-be/ https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my... http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/ http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/ (don't miss part 2 and three)
- unicornporn 7y ago
  Almost missed the best one: https://pastebin.com/raw/zHCBBTVu https://pastebin.com/raw/zHCBBTVu
jimktrains2 7y ago
Ive found myself spending a bit more time on YouTube recently and I've been curious as to why. I've come to the conclusion that I much enjoy consuming something that someone, or at least small group of people, care about and find that a lot of good information can be shared. (It also helps in that regard that I've been watching wood ajd metal working channels.) So, why not websites and just ddg or Google subjects? The more I thought about it and paid attention, the more I realized that top results are all large sites with next to no content and finding those personal websites, those labous of love filled with information is neigh impossible. I miss being able to find those smaller sites organically.
- nullwarp 7y ago
  I've found many great sites recently using https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ which definitely feels like a search engine of old
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    Thanks! I'll have to give it a shot.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    As a side note, and JFYI, there is seemingly from the ashes of DMOZ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ a new kid on the block: https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/
p4bl0 7y ago
I love my website too, and personal websites in general. Mine is also handcrafted (well, I have a few scripts to help me but all the HTML and CSS are written by hand). I also maintain and host a little service that allow my friends and friends of friends to have and easily manage a personal website, in particular for those in academia (but outside CS).
100-xyz 7y ago
If you would like to be easily found by people geographically near you, you can add yourself to its-near.me We are currently looking for personal websites to add. Let me know if you have any questions. https://its-near.me https://its-near.me
floatingatoll 7y ago
If you want to make a website accessible to any human but essentially invisible to search engines, configure basic authentication to require and accept any username and/or password, and then set the auth description to “Enter anything to continue”. Human beings will enter anything and read your article, with the browser caching the credentials for a while, but the vast majority of search engines will treat the 401 as “indexing not permitted under law”, to a degree that your site might not even be returned as a result at all. Robots.txt doesn’t have the same effect and is soundly ignored by many malicious/uncaring web spiders and tools, unlike 401. It seems like the smallest thing in the world, but it’s why forums that require you to login to search are so safe against harassment - as long as they block web spidering!

204 points by devbas 7y ago

What's interesting about this is Tobias, the author, earns a living making an awesome skin for wordpress called Semplice. I've been using Semplice for the past couple years and as a designer who used to code, it makes making my portfolio site a heck of a lot easier. There's still a lot of time sunk into it. I just don't have to fuss with some of the details. So in theory, he helps me keep my personal site alive, even if I am now using the crutch of WP.

verisimilitudes 7y ago

I agree with the general idea, but dislike the WWW. I find it fundamentally poor from the start. I'd rather make the comparison to having one's own node on the Internet. I rent a server and I rent several DNS names. Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet. Through this, I'm able to host a website, a Gopher hole, a Finger service, my own email, and I'll host FTP, IRC, and other things as I want to. There's not much of a limit. This is nice and freeing. I decide how everything's presented and done; I use my own server software in some instances. I can agree that having one's own website is an introduction to this manner of freedom, though.

saagarjha 7y ago
> Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet. It’s one of the more resilient platforms out there, at least considered to company-hosted social media sites.

boobePhuu7iet7i 7y ago

Loving the irony of having links to Instagram and Twitter in the footer of that post :P

sushid 7y ago
Not to mention as someone above mentioned, that the guy makes a living selling WP themes.

teddyh 7y ago

More than two years ago, I wrote this: […] What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine. Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising. — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456

pier25 7y ago
Facebook is the industrialization of personal information which has its pros and cons.
knzhou 7y ago

Rafuino 7y ago

Finally bought myself a personal domain but am now currently agonizing over how to design the damn thing, let alone what to actually put on there!

neilv 7y ago
You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5): <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>Rafuino's site</title> </head> <body> <h1>Rafuino's site</h1> <p>Welcome!</p> <p><i>Under Construction</i></p> </body> </html> It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on gray, but you could CSS that in. :)
- kylek 7y ago
  You forgot <blink> and <marquee> (and some sick midi tunes)
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    You forgot <blink> and <marquee> (and some sick midi tunes) Thanks to CSS animations, you can recreate <blink> and <marquee>. I use it to recreate the Amiga's Guru Meditation Error when I'm debugging web sites.
    - shantly 7y ago
      I had a legit use for a marquee a few months ago and couldn't find a jank-free way to actually re-create all of its features. You can get the basics but even that sucks compared to just using <marquee> (heavier, more code).
    - kylek 7y ago
      Oh, I'm very aware (I actually do use those tricks on my personal page. Unfortunately I left out the midi. And of course it's loaded with stolen gifs from gifcities[0]) [0] https://gifcities.org/ https://gifcities.org/

pier25 7y ago

For the past 4 years I've been too busy and have only written a couple of articles on Medium[1]. Thankfully I'm ending my current job which has consumed my time, energy, and soul for far too long and I want to get into the habit of writing again. This time on my personal site, not on Medium. [1] https://medium.com/@Pier https://medium.com/@Pier

whitehouse3 7y ago
I’m glad to hear we’ll see more of your writing. I dove deep into front end frameworks after a lot of research last year. Your clear and thoughtful comments about React helped me a lot. Congrats on making a positive career change.
- pier25 7y ago
  Thanks for your nice comment, I really appreciate it.

joelrunyon 7y ago

In an effort to get people to bring back the blog, I started https://startablog.com https://startablog.com - to do just that. We actually offer to set up people's blogs for free here - http://startablog.com/free-blog http://startablog.com/free-blog (and are hoping to help 10,000 people do it). I know WP blogs are not always the favorite of the HN crowd, but Wordpress has been super accessible (esp for newbies) once things are setup, so hopefully we can remove that first (slightly technical) obstacle for the crowd that's used to doing something on everyone else's platform.

neilv 7y ago

One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc. My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve URLs for some open source contributions. It's also personal, with none of my professional work on it. I'd bet the vintage look has cost me a few business opportunities, but not every aspect of my life has to follow this year's commercial fashion. Shoot me if I ever give my little personal site a stock React look, or a big dynamic anti-Web framework, or third-party CDNs to mitigate bloat hosting costs, or something like that. :)

state_less 7y ago
I really enjoyed the look of your site and hope you don't trade it in for another cookie cutter site like so many others.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Cheers on the note “my professional work isn’t here”. Makes me wonder if I should be more explicit like that. I have to side with you on this. And I do use those modern frameworks at work. My goal was to keep mine working coherently in Lynx, but uses some JS for syntax highlighting and a click event or two that degrade well enough. It’s also an awful hacked together static-ish blog in Go behind Nginx. I was working on an improvement last night and realized how much I’d learned since I wrote it. It’s funny and frustrating at the same time. Might be time to start over again.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  I spent years rebuilding my site several times over, trying to appear as professional and modern as possible. A while back I got fed up, spent about 15-20 minutes writing some basic html, and came up with a simple page. I haven't looked back since. https://danielvaughn.github.io/info/ https://danielvaughn.github.io/info/

Kye 7y ago

Something even more pernicious about social media: if you build an audience there, you're trapped. You can easily convince yourself a lot of people care about what you say right up until you link to something more substantial off the silo. The ActivityPub fediverse is a lot better about this, but even there I might get one visit to a linked page for every ten boosts. Getting people to look at a website in 2019 is hard. It used to be easier. I could get 1000 people to look at a blog post on just about anything. Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away. You might get lucky and land on a long tail keyword that Google ranks you for, but search traffic is unpredictable even if you go out of your way to research keywords. I get 140k views a month and tons of retweets/likes on Twitter when I'm active. The website has a few posts with some search traffic, but nothing like 140k.

movedx 7y ago
> Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away. This is very true. I've got a YouTube channel and I'm developing premium training solutions on the side of it in Podia... video is king. People want high value (to learn something) wrapped in high quality and compacted into a 5-10 (max) minute video. And they want it for free... sigh. Remember, though, that Google is the #1 search engine, so blogging (and SEO) is still important to drive traffic towards your videos. That being said videos will take over. I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I believe it said in the next 5-10 years at least three billion people are coming online and they want video, because video is how they want to consume knowledge. I think people should start picking up a camera.
- Kye 7y ago
  It sounds like you're talking about one specific kind of content: educational material. That's not what I make or have any interest in making. And there is no way I'd get on camera even if I wanted to do video. I do not believe video will come to dominate such that text and audio won't still have a place. I personally can't get much out of most non-fiction videos, and I know I'm not alone. I didn't even watch more than 0-2 YouTube videos a month until I found ContraPoints and got pulled into lefttube.

crustacean 7y ago

Can anyone give advice about how you built your personal website(s?) while having strong professional interests in multiple areas? I’d be really grateful to see an example. I have a career in tech and also a career in music. My professional networks in these areas don’t overlap. I don’t think everyone responds positively to the dual career thing, although some definitely do. Just make two sites and don’t link them? Get a stage name vs a tech name? Create a unified portfolio as a creative technologist?

umvi 7y ago
I use a static site generator called Hugo. All my web pages are markdown and Hugo turns them into HTML and applies a theme I chose. Great for if the content on your site is all static. umvirate.com
ryacko 7y ago
Only if you want your professional interests to be separate. Just have one web page dedicated to your tech portfolio, and another web page dedicated to music. Or even a whole section of your website. Or have two separate websites hosted on the same IP address or not. Personally I prefer PHP and using includes for menus, footers, or sidebars.
ewams 7y ago
I wrote my own in php years ago... ewams.net Most of the things I post are not directly tied to my current job but more of things I am interested in, like the cpu sizing tool I wrote http://ewams.net/specintd/ http://ewams.net/specintd/ or web scraping, security, data integrity, etc. Just something to store my research in really. Just get started!
maverick2007 7y ago
I did something a similar except instead of music I'm a huge theme park fan and wanted a portion of my personal site to be dedicated to my trips (instead of hosting the pictures on Facebook or the like) so I decided to separate out the roller coaster portion of my persona and put it at a subdomain of my personal site (https://coasters.joshimbriani.com https://coasters.joshimbriani.com for those curious) whereas my main site remains mostly tech focused (https://joshimbriani.com https://joshimbriani.com). I've been pretty pleased with the setup for now seeing as how I can nerd out about coasters without alienating the other half of my (non-existent) audience

podviaznikov 7y ago

There are so many cool personal sites out there. I'm constantly amazed by the quality and creativity. I publish now from dropbox. Ofc using my own tool https://docs.montaigne.io https://docs.montaigne.io. It's already helped me do add content more freequently

ambivalents 7y ago
This looks cool, thank you very much for sharing. However, I tried signing up and got an error message from Dropbox: "This app has reached its user limit. Contact the app developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to increase their app's user limit."
- podviaznikov 7y ago
  Ok, enabled Dropbox for more users. You can try it now, if you want!
  - ambivalents 7y ago
    Giving it a spin. Thank you!

aledalgrande 7y ago

I think (hope) in the next years we will see an increase of personal sites. With products like Ghost, it's easier for everyone to make one and it doesn't involve a ton of coding. You can focus on the content and own everything. I wonder if we'll be able to connect these personal sites together like a crowdsourced Medium? Edit: I'm talking about self hosted Ghost

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mirimir 7y ago

I've done many personal websites, and the discussion forum or two, over the years. And more or less without exception, the lack of engagement has been disheartening. But (of course, I guess) most of them were Tor onion sites, so silence was predictable. But even on clearnet, promoting personal websites is nontrivial. How does one do it?

saagarjha 7y ago
Put things that would interest others, and let others find it. If you’re feeling brave, you can link to it in an appropriate context. For example, in this thread sharing my own personal website might be relevant: https://saagarjha.com https://saagarjha.com

Rerarom 7y ago

At least in academia the tradition is still going strong.

ht_th 7y ago
Unfortunately, with the advent of electronic learning management systems and corporate content management systems in universities that are as much as required to be used, this seems to be declining fast. Currently I work as a lecturer at the same university I studied at twenty years ago. Then, almost every teacher and researcher did have their own website behind "~username" on the open web. For most it was just a list of publications and courses they taught. For these courses they often made an overview page with links to all kinds of interesting material, from lecture notes, old exams, literature, to tools, thoughts, and curiosities. Some went all out and made a personalized personal web page with all kinds of interesting content. I spend a lot of time browsing and reading and exploring these pages when I was a student. Now I wished I had downloaded them all. Now, no-one but some old-timers do have a "~username" web page. Courses and their materials are hidden away behind the walls of the learning management system we use. Their publications are visible via the library's repository and bibliographical system. For the rest, everything that is on the open web on the university's servers is published via the corporate content management system with rules and regulation what and how to post and most employees do not have access to edit anyway. Many researchers are part of some academic social networks like researchgate, but that's outside the scope of the university's servers. What is left is for those who are interested to share to setup their own websites elsewhere. Not many do, unfortunately.
- Rerarom 7y ago
  Yup, I've noticed that too. Even worse, some younger people would consider it to be a tremendous burden to write their own HTML/CSS/JS.

unicornporn 7y ago

> written from years of thinking on the subject While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of personal websites, this post did nothing for me. So many words and so little to add. These texts are slightly related and did something more: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my-website-is-a-shifting-house-next-to-a-river-of-knowledge-what-could-yours-be/ https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my... http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/ http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/ (don't miss part 2 and three)

unicornporn 7y ago
Almost missed the best one: https://pastebin.com/raw/zHCBBTVu https://pastebin.com/raw/zHCBBTVu

jimktrains2 7y ago

Ive found myself spending a bit more time on YouTube recently and I've been curious as to why. I've come to the conclusion that I much enjoy consuming something that someone, or at least small group of people, care about and find that a lot of good information can be shared. (It also helps in that regard that I've been watching wood ajd metal working channels.) So, why not websites and just ddg or Google subjects? The more I thought about it and paid attention, the more I realized that top results are all large sites with next to no content and finding those personal websites, those labous of love filled with information is neigh impossible. I miss being able to find those smaller sites organically.

nullwarp 7y ago
I've found many great sites recently using https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ which definitely feels like a search engine of old
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  Thanks! I'll have to give it a shot.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  As a side note, and JFYI, there is seemingly from the ashes of DMOZ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ a new kid on the block: https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/

p4bl0 7y ago

I love my website too, and personal websites in general. Mine is also handcrafted (well, I have a few scripts to help me but all the HTML and CSS are written by hand). I also maintain and host a little service that allow my friends and friends of friends to have and easily manage a personal website, in particular for those in academia (but outside CS).

100-xyz 7y ago

If you would like to be easily found by people geographically near you, you can add yourself to its-near.me We are currently looking for personal websites to add. Let me know if you have any questions. https://its-near.me https://its-near.me

floatingatoll 7y ago

If you want to make a website accessible to any human but essentially invisible to search engines, configure basic authentication to require and accept any username and/or password, and then set the auth description to “Enter anything to continue”. Human beings will enter anything and read your article, with the browser caching the credentials for a while, but the vast majority of search engines will treat the 401 as “indexing not permitted under law”, to a degree that your site might not even be returned as a result at all. Robots.txt doesn’t have the same effect and is soundly ignored by many malicious/uncaring web spiders and tools, unlike 401. It seems like the smallest thing in the world, but it’s why forums that require you to login to search are so safe against harassment - as long as they block web spidering!