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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

81–90 of 436 posts

Re: Have a personal web site

#81
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well don't hold back. What are the games :)

Worked on: Operation Flashpoint Virtual Battlespace 2 Virtual Battlespace 3 ARMA ARMA II Side project with Titan Vanguard/Outerra. Then left the game industry. Got married, had kids, and now divorced and getting back into larger projects.

Operation Flashpoint was one of my favourite games as a kid. It felt ground-breakingly realistic at the time.

Re: Have a personal web site

#82
I've been blogging for 7 years using Wordpress (hosted, with my name as the domain name). It's been a great experience, and I wish I had started earlier. I don't feel any pressure to blog every week or every month, but over the years the content has built up anyway. At an interview recently, I was asked several questions (e.g. What makes a great programmer, What are the most important lessons you have learnt) for which I could point to blog posts I had written.

I've written about my experience blogging here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...

Re: Have a personal web site

#83
Couldn't agree more.

A place on the internet that you own and can write your thoughts down is very valuable. Yes, there are other services that you can leverage (medium, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, stack overflow, to name a few, depending on your content and desired reach) but your content there will alwybe subject to the whims of others. Big companies aren't always going to have your best interest at heart.

It's a bit of a pain to set up, but as the article states, you get your own space. Writing is one of the ways I learn best, and any writing I do is highly leveragable and can be used by folks far into the future. With your own site, you also have, again as the article states, a place to do low risk but still meaningful technical exploration.

I have had my own site for almost 20 years and look forward to having it for 20 more.

Also, see this post from Dion Almaer about bringing content back to his site vs a third party service:

https://blog.almaer.com/almaer-com-reopens-for-business/

Re: Have a personal web site

#84

In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.

I'd be curious to know how well that's enforced. There's an ocean full of HR tech startups that are doing just that programmatically, to produce scores on all sorts of things to rate candidates.

Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence.

If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.

Re: Have a personal web site

#85

I wouldn't expect a younger person to have a personal website, given that it's almost impossible to come up with a domain name that's not taken. For instance, my real name is also Mark Christian. What am I going to do, register markchristian1.org? theothermarkchristian.org? Might as well not have a website at that point.

The domain is irrelevant, provided you own it. Choose whatever you like from the remaining .coms or the hundreds of new TLDs. If your name is in the content and you're smart about meta descriptions and title tags, the domain isn't an issue for a personal site.

Re: Have a personal web site

#86

In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.

I started a personal website because the other person with my name was a cannabis legalisation advocate.

This was the early 2000s, and I was easily able to knock him from the top spot on the major search engines.

Re: Have a personal web site

#87
post #20

I would consider being an online ghost as a great compliment with how everything has been lately. There is way too much public information being pumped out for no reason at all.

This was my sentiment while reading the article. Two years ago I went through a process of completely stripping away my online presence. I'm now unsearchable by name, name and company, name and home town. The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

> I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.

Re: Have a personal web site

#88

IMHO, a personal website that is super out of date looks worse than one that doesn't exist. My website is a good example of this (being out of date). So I recently removed it from my resume.

It seems the opposite is true in academia where most academics have a personal website but the normal style is best described as “mid 1990s”.

By out of date, I meant lacking any recent content.

Re: Have a personal web site

#89
post #50
post #45

Something about this comments page plays the Trogdor the Burninator song (in the premii HN app on Android). I've never had that happen before, anyone else experiencing it?

It's from a comment with a link to this web site. http://www.minions.com/

Yeah, seems like the app is prefetching links.

Re: Have a personal web site

#90

Don't see how you could be a ghost online with a name like Mark Christian. There would be a ton of Mark Christian's all vying for attention.

All the more reason that you would be a ghost, since you are now competing with all of them for search result ranking.
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