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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

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Re: Have a personal web site

#181
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "do…

> completely generic phrases are being eliminated from the allowed speech

But that's not happening. Anyone can say "it's ok to be white" wherever and whenever they want - as evidenced by the fact that PEOPLE DO.

What's happening is that other people are going "Hmm, well, if he's happy to use a known white supremacist phrase, we're happy to lump him in with the white supremacists."

But now the first bunch of people and their defenders are complaining about the second bunch judging them on their actions. Which is HILARIOUS.

(Generally because the first bunch don't agree with freedom of speech unless it solely benefits them.)

Re: Have a personal web site

#182

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk y…

> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off (even though I do include my side projects etc.), but to write about specific issues I managed to solve. As a software developer, I'm googling for problems all the time. 95% of the time I land on StackOverflow or GitHub issues. But…

> My goal was to contribute back the same way.

YES! So much of our computing-related triumphs come from documentation that other people wrote. Even super basic stuff that no senior developer or sysadmin would dream of asking, that stuff still needs to be written down by someone.

I have a dozen or so Markdown documents of varying sizes that I need to finish, proof and polish before putting them online. I sorely lacking in motivation (and sleep)

Re: Have a personal web site

#183

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…

I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link. It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.

For the longest time searching for "Steve", in the UK, brought my website as the first result.

These days with "personalised" search results it is harder to tell, but my own searches for my full-name bring me first. Even though I share that name with a few other people.

(I wish I'd bought steve.com, there was a time when I was tempted but after a year or two it was too late. I ended up having https://steve.org.uk, then later https://steve.fi after I moved to Finland.)

Re: Have a personal web site

#184

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk y…

Rather than a personal website, I think having an "nonpersonal" website ( or domain ) in order to learn and play around with technologies like ( web server, database, dns, networking, etc ) is better. Though I guess you could do all that locally within your own intranet.

Re: Have a personal web site

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines. I have several name-doppelgängers out there that do ample SEO for themselves. Plus we have the rapper now. I have close to zero presence on social media. You would be hard pressed to find a single photo of me by doing basic name and location searches. Really didn’t have to do any scru…

>I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines.

Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.

Re: Have a personal web site

#186

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk y…

> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off (even though I do include my side projects etc.), but to write about specific issues I managed to solve. As a software developer, I'm googling for problems all the time. 95% of the time I land on StackOverflow or GitHub issues. But…

Out of curiosity, why not use a free platform like stack overflow or a github issue to publish your solutions?

Re: Have a personal web site

#187

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…

> Try googling for John Carmack,

And what should the top match for John Carmack be, in your opinion? Where is his homepage?

FWIW on Bing I got his Wikipedia article first and his twitter accoount second, which seems like sensible results in his case.

Re: Have a personal web site

#188

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…

I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link. It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.

Me too. I have a simple static site/blog with mostly textual content going back to around 1999 and I'm lucky to have a reasonably unique firstname/lastname combo (ish); my blog currently is top on Google and Bing.

Re: Have a personal web site

#189

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…

Maybe someone should build a seach engine that only indexes pages without ads. That would mainly be private blogs and wikipedia, I guess.

Re: Have a personal web site

#190
post #91

I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that... Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster. For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`. (The longer story behind thi…

> I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that... > > Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster.

Much the same sort-of chronology and hosting story for me…

> For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`.

I'm curious to pick your brains on that. I've gone the other way: I ended up standardising on a .net but I kinda wish I had the .org instead, my rationale is, .org is a closer match to what my site is: if I squint I can consider it to be an "organisation" of one, but I can't convince myself that it or I'm a network. I originally picked the .net because I thought it scanned better with my choice of domain.

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