Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 436 posts

Re: Have a personal web site

#261

Post by base698 »

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anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.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…

> Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk your ear off about the places I've been and the things I've done, but if I'm objective about it, none of it is particularly praiseworthy, and it's hardly going to make me stand out to a potential employer. Any attempt to dramatize my life or skills is going to reek of pomposity, even the rare bits that are somewhat unique.

https://fs.blog/2012/07/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-peo...

Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

Re: Have a personal web site

#262

Post by Etheryte »

_lbaq wrote: post #230

If you wanted to start one, what would be the easiest way of doing so, preferably an all static site. ?

As a developer, a very natural choice would be Github Pages and Jekyll [1]. If you're not a fan of having your whole site out in the public like that, you can also use Jekyll locally. I'm sure there's other similar static site generators, but Jekyll is pretty widely used and in my opinion easy to get started with.

[1] https://jekyllrb.com/docs/github-pages/

Re: Have a personal web site

#263

Post by dejawu »

loosetypes wrote: post #33
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…

Agreed. I'm a bit jealous of his (Mostly) food truck name ideas, https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/ . Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry. And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.

He forgot the best two:

Gyros and Villains

Spaghett-about-it

Re: Have a personal web site

#264

Post by Zigurd »

With a name like Zigurd, SEO isn't a problem. Nor was registering the .com. A very simple site that points to Amazon and other places with information in context is useful. Google Sites is free and simple, and it is no longer sucky looking and retro. It took longer to do the "do you own this url" dance with Hover's DNS tab for the url than it did to create the site.

Re: Have a personal web site

#267

Post by markchristian »

loosetypes wrote: post #33
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…

Agreed. I'm a bit jealous of his (Mostly) food truck name ideas, https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/ . Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry. And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.

A+ name ideas.

Re: Have a personal web site

#268

Post by leftyted »

jartelt wrote: post #243
leftyted wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think your view is too cynical. People also can be motivated by altruism or by wanting to pay it forward. I've answered plenty of questions on facebook/reddit/etc. and do so because people have answered my questions in the past. The part you are correct about is that it is easy to then get wrapped up in how many visitors your blog gets or how many upvotes your answer gets. Those vanity metrics definitely pull on th…

> But, some people definitely do not care about "showing-off" when they put something up online.

If you don't care about showing off then you won't publish anything. People who are actually altruistic won't tell you about their altruism.

This isn't cynicism. The hunger for respect, admiration and recognition is not a bad thing. But it is necessary for people to understand what motivates them. And it is necessary for us to construct a society in which respect is earned by performing actions that are broadly beneficial to that society (as far as we can estimate, anyway).

Today, anyone can broadcast. But that doesn't mean that everyone should broadcast. The old gatekepers weren't perfect but they served a necessary purpose. Who are the new gatekeepers?

Re: Have a personal web site

#269

Post by Vordimous »

Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier to start blogging. I just mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/

I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

Re: Have a personal web site

#270

Post by marcolussetti »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #170
raffomania wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like a big audience is the only thing that matters. The linked post talks about a personal website as a digital identity. Giving people a link so they can find you online is a good reason to have a website, even today. Besides that, making your own website is rewarding in many other ways - Being creative, getting thoughts out of your head, pinning down certain arguments you tend to repeat, etc.

> Giving people a link so they can find you online… …does not always work. When I give people a link they can't click on, they type it in the search bar . And not even in full, they tend to strip the http://www and .com ends. And you can't click on a piece of paper, which is where my CV typically ends up on. Last week, I interviewed with someone who said he googled me. All he found was a "little GitHub page". My full…

Your personal website come second for me. I wonder whether the person just looked at the first result.
Post reply on HN