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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

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Re: Have a personal web site

#131

Post by r3bl »

keerthiko wrote: post #114

The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website. I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or t…

My full name is very common. I share it with an actor, a photographer, two designers, and one basketball player. Three of us have personal websites and one of us has a Wikipedia page.

I've adopted the alias "r3bl" to counter that, so that there's something easy to remember and somewhat unique that others could type into a search engine. ".com" was of course squatted, but as far as I could tell, it was pretty unique (with one "e" emitted and one "e" replaced with a 3 like a True Hacker). Now I share that alias with two esports teams and one Silicon Valley company that could afford to buy ".com" from the squatter. I appear anywhere from #1 result to not on the first page at all, depending on your location.

Re: Have a personal web site

#132

Post by gargs »

In the same vein, I consider it a dark pattern when companies don’t have a a public email for recruitment purposes. Ideally, every opening should have an associated email answered by a real person. It’s kind of rich to expect candidates to upload custom cover letters, CVs, samples of work, but only expect them to receive template replies. Some companies even state that replies are not guaranteed.

Re: Have a personal web site

#133

Post by pKaqzd »

zimpenfish wrote: post #125
xncYCa wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence presented in those links is pretty poor. Especially: https://www.theroot.com/minecraft-creator-goes-full-white-pr... WTF, you cannot say that it's OK to be white? Seems to me that there are racists on Twitter, but it's not Notch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_OK_to_be_white > The slogan has been spread by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and racist groups including neo-Nazis and white supremacists. > A report by the ADL states that the phrase itself has a history within the white supremacist movement going back to 2001 when it was used as the title of a song by a white power music group called Aggressive Force as well as fliers with the p…

I'm not from the US, but the Wikipedia article makes me think that some people over there have lost their minds and have too much time on their hands.

I recommend studying organizations like the NKWD and Stasi, if completely generic phrases are being eliminated from the allowed speech just because a small group of persons have also used them.

So if I'm using the phrase "campus craziness", it now means that it's a "dog whistle" and I'm 100% aligned with Tucker Carlson and all of his views.

If I say "It is fine to be white", is that not a "dog whistle"? What expression passes the NKWD test?

Re: Have a personal web site

#134

Post by coldtea »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #124
keerthiko wrote: post #114

The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website. I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or t…

You don't need the SEO for your name in particular. Here is why: 1. People who know you have your url. 2. People you meet have a business card or SMS from you with the URL 3. People searching for you can find you on social media, but most social media allows you to link to the site. 4. People searching for the keywords you use in your posts will find you if they are unique enough.

Even people with the url will usually just search, not use the url. Even less so if it's on a business card (even if it's a QR code).

Re: Have a personal web site

#135

Post by stakhanov »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #119
stakhanov wrote: post #77

A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?" The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content…

I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff. I think that was the core of the "old" 97 websites - I mean Google didn't exist back then, so finding a page when you search for a n…

My own recollection of the pre-Google era of Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc was that search engines already accounted for the lion's share of content discovery online. My gut feeling would be that it might have been even larger back then than it is now, considering the role that social media play nowadays.

What it was like before then I can't say as I'm not that old, but I imagine that URLs would have been made known through the usenet, irc and so on, which were also more multicast/broadcast in nature than word-of-mouth in the sense of people who actually personally know each other in meatspace communicating point-to-point.

Re: Have a personal web site

#136

Post by caprese »

Fascinating how I agree with the headline and disagree with the article completely.

Personal websites are a lot easier to control and chronicle what you want them to. They also help with SEO and also community building if you desire that.

When I didn't desire that, I was very content being a "need to know senior engineer" behind the scenes. I gamed my third-party recruiters to do all the work for me and we all made money.

Re: Have a personal web site

#137

Post by otikik »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #61

I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life. But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracur…

I used to think the same way as you. Until something happened in my life that changed me.

I used to have a very fruitful open source life. I have a personal website, a blog, etc. Some of my libraries are useful and reasonably known on my niche.

Then I had a child. Everything changed after that. I suddenly don't have time or energy to devote to open source any more.

I am the same person as before, but if you looked at my online activity before and after, it's like two different people. If you "give points" to the person who had a lot of personal free time in the past, you'll be missing the one who doesn't know (but is just as capable, he just has other things to do, or less free time).

With students it's the same deal. If you give points to the ones with a very strong online presence you are prioritizing the ones which have the luxury of free time to invest. You will miss on the ones who, say, are taking care of an elderly person, or have to work in the cafeteria every day after class in order to make ends meet.

Re: Have a personal web site

#138

Post by dspillett »

keerthiko wrote: post #114

The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website. I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or t…

> What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?

Is this really an issue?

Someone looking for you personally either for professional or personal reasons already knows who you are so probably already has the relevant URL: from your CV or application form/letter, on a business card, from an email footer, because you've posted links on social media where they are linked to or otherwise follow you, from your profiles on online forums, by deriving it from your email address, ...

Someone looking for the sort of content you are publishing (if it isn't personal journal/diary/blog/etc. style content) will be searching for terms relevant to that and not your name, or those terms plus your name if you are well known in the field. Any SEO should be targetted at that content, not your name.

Before asking "how would someone find me by searching for my name?", first consider "why would anyone feel the need to find me by searching for my name?". It is most likely not a problem you actually need to solve.

> your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project, ... ... will rank first and ahead of any personal website

Because those things are most likely what people are actually looking for. Remember: search engines are focused on giving the searchers what they want, not sending them to where you want them to go.

Where you have control of the content (you might on a project page, you will on your social media accounts), solve that problem by having links to your personal page in a prominent place. If someone doesn't click the extra time then they really weren't wanting to find you hard enough!

Re: Have a personal web site

#139

Post by jzzskijj »

naavis wrote: post #66
jzzskijj wrote: post #28

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.

The article said that the applicant googled the interviewer, though.

Yes, right after posting I realized I wasn't directly on the topic. I hope it brings some value to discussion anyway.

Re: Have a personal web site

#140

Post by 50 »

Spare_account wrote: post #78
RenRav wrote: 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 too stripped away my online presence a few years ago. I even went ahead further and deleted all my accounts I don't use, aren't privacy-oriented, etc. I now have a spreadsheet of the very few accounts I have for specific products and services. To that extent, I rarely sign up for anything new these days and or use a lot of applications and services.

I also say nay to having an online presence. I prefer silent, out-of-sight, deep work. On the other hand, I do support having a blog to journal and or log about anything you'd like, public or private. If public, I suggest to not use your real name, etc, but an unusual name like a 8-bit binary number.

Not having an online presence is free-ing. Having an online presence feels like you're a brand and are subjugated to update. Cal Newport might have talked about something along these above things in his latest book, "Digital Minimalism".

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