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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

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Re: Have a personal web site

#231

Post by rcarmo »

I've been reading the comments for a few hours, and am actually amazed that this is still at the top of HN, so here goes:

I've kept a blog (https://taoofmac.com) for over 15 years, and I've derived satisfaction from it on three main counts: I like to write in general (and keep notes, and the site actually started out as a Wiki of notes covering my migration to the Mac), I like to tweak the code behind it (although new releases are now years apart), and I like the (little) correspondence that comes from people who tackled the same issues (sometimes with different solutions).

As to exposure, it was great fun in the pre-iOS days and when Mac blogs were all the rage. But professionally (and this is the bit where I think some pushback is needed) I get exactly _zero_ benefits from it, because:

- What I write about technically has (by design) nearly zero import on my work, skills or career aspirations

- LinkedIn has become the de facto "show off" (cess)pool, and although I write a few opinion pieces now and then and post them there (and on Medium), the novelty value has largely worn off

In fact, my online presence has, if anything, been a nuisance in my career moves--my currently being at Microsoft and keeping a Mac-related blog is often commented upon, for instance, and many recruiters who approach me via that route usually think I'm a developer (I also have http://carmo.io, but that has essentially zero visibility).

Re: Have a personal web site

#232

Post by wongarsu »

Kirth wrote: post #218
tigerlily wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs. Hmm, I wonder if there's a search engine tailored to this sort of thing? As in search all the blogs for human knowledge and experience.

This has been stuck in my mind for a while. The past months, whenever I searched for something I would get covered in pages upon pages of SEO-friendly copywriter bullshit without real content; it's driving me mad. How possible would it be, to build something like this?

You could start a search engine with data from commoncrawl, maybe you can even get other projects like archive.is to ship you some hard drives. Then you just need to build an index and serve search queries; plenty of open source search engines have been attempted, giving good Templates or even directly usable implementations.

The hard thing is distinguishing personal blogs from blogspam and other worthless content. Performance is a huge issue since you want to spend at most double digit milliseconds per page, but maybe it's getting viable with ML becoming commoditized. But getting this perfect would make or break the project.

Re: Have a personal web site

#233

Post by leftyted »

darekkay wrote: post #160
caymanjim wrote: post #151

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…

> The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off

That's what they all say.

Humans are social creatures and the main motivator for anyone to do anything in public is to "show off" or "be interesting". "All is vanity".

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Without a desire to compete, impress, prove our worth and so on we'd be living in huts. But it's something to be aware of and something that should be tempered.

I think the pendulum is swinging away from modesty plus self-reflection and towards "people documenting their lives in public".

Re: Have a personal web site

#234

Post by onion2k »

all2 wrote: post #228
onion2k wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a well-written comment from an interesting point of view. That's all you need to write a blog article. Writing HN comments is much easier than writing blog posts because the inspiration is the story that's been linked to; for a blog post you don't have that starting point, you just have a blank page. That's a heck of a barrier for most people when they're starting out.

I've considered rolling comments I've made here into blog posts. I'm not sure if that's a fox paws[0], though. [0] I know. I did it on purpose.

Jokes are like code. If you have to explain then it's probably not very good. ;)

Re: Have a personal web site

#235

Post by qnsi »

Kirth wrote: post #218
tigerlily wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs. Hmm, I wonder if there's a search engine tailored to this sort of thing? As in search all the blogs for human knowledge and experience.

This has been stuck in my mind for a while. The past months, whenever I searched for something I would get covered in pages upon pages of SEO-friendly copywriter bullshit without real content; it's driving me mad. How possible would it be, to build something like this?

I am also thinking about this problem constantly. SEO destroyed internet for me. I keep searching on HN using https://hn.algolia.com but obviously you can use it only for specific topics. I think there is a market in this problem

Re: Have a personal web site

#236

Post by lazyjones »

hnarayanan wrote: post #148
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…

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.

> 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.

Disagree. My first personal web page from 1996 is still online and I have a very rare (perhaps unique) name. Until a few years ago, all my personal pages (including FB, Twitter) were ranked high by search engines, but since then they've been dethroned by references to former companies, press coverage, websites that list people affiliated with corporations and other such things.

My conclusion from this is that personal pages have somehow been ranked lower recently and news sites and popular websites will be ranked higher if they mention your name (even if the mention is not prominent and years old). This means that nowadays it would probably be useful to put a personal homepage on a popular site like about.me.

Re: Have a personal web site

#237

Post by nkrisc »

caymanjim wrote: post #151

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 used to feel the same way as you, but then I decided I didn't care if I was interesting or not (I'm not). So I made myself a website. I only update it a handful of times a year when I have something that I'm excited enough to write about. I choose a dead simple design that would be timeless and never need updating.[0]

Turns out a few things I've written about have actually been very helpful and useful to a handful of other people in the world, and they even emailed me to thank me for sharing it! That was pleasant. I'm not looking to be famous or popular, but it felt good knowing that something I had done helped a few other people out.

[0] My styles are based on this: https://github.com/programble/writ

It's basically Web 1.0 but made to look nice and read well on large screens.

I'm a UX designer in my professional life but the last thing I wanted was a slick, trendy, bloated site. My site is completely static and loads blazingly fast. The CSS is simple too so it should play nice with user-agent styles too.

Re: Have a personal web site

#238

Post by jjgreen »

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 (not uncommon) name used to have my site in the top 3, then I was pushed to page 5-6 by the opening of a Night Market in Bangkok, I guess there are worse ways to go.

Re: Have a personal web site

#239

Post by z92 »

tigerlily wrote: post #112
jaabe wrote: post #13

Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author. I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out lo…

> If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs. Hmm, I wonder if there's a search engine tailored to this sort of thing? As in search all the blogs for human knowledge and experience.

That engine will be equally spammed by SEO posters. Look how hard google is trying and still failing.

Re: Have a personal web site

#240

Post by vict00ms »

lettergram wrote: post #201
caymanjim wrote: post #151

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 recently wrote a blog about “Dutch Oven Fried Chicken”[1], I don’t think it’s particularly interesting and anyone can do it. However, now I can send a link to a friend and go back and make the recipe myself. Blogging for me isn’t about popularity. It’s about being able to share ones ideas and document your interests. I send links to my blog all the time, because I wrote about topics I found challenging / fun. I don…

You should consider using a trivet to keep your chicken off the bottom of the dutch oven/where the temperatures are more consistent.
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