If you wanted to start one, what would be the easiest way of doing so, preferably an all static site. ?
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Have a personal web site
321–330 of 436 posts
Re: Have a personal web site
#322Have a personal web site and a blog! Great idea, will work on it :)
Re: Have a personal web site
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.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…
I tried doing what the OP described, become some interesting blogger person, but threw in a 2 or 3 line article about some mundane error I had with a tool one day mixed in with all the other wordfluff. Surprisingly the error code drew a ton of traffic compared to anything interesting I could have possibly thought about writing.
You stumbled upon a technical writing best practice. Always include the exact error code and message in documentation because people often search for that exact string.
Re: Have a personal web site
#324I 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anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.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 I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.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…
Agreed. I try to frame my posts to have helpful information first and foremost, for others in the same situations or even for my future self. Or for trip report type posts, for any others that were on the trip with me.
Re: Have a personal web site
#325The 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…
This bugs me too. The best I can do is make sure that all of my profiles on my social media sites prominently link back to my personal site.
Re: Have a personal web site
#326Another reason to have a personal web site is that it allows you to define your digital identity. If you don't, other people or worse, corporations, can easily publish documents, texts, tweets or something else that will make you look in a certain way.
You don't have to post amazing pictures or publish Paul Graham essays, publish once a year and having the link in your email footer is enough to establish to others who you are
Re: Have a personal web site
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't care about showing off then you won't publish anything I want to agree, but how can we explain near-anonymous StackOverflow profiles who have brilliant answers in them, but no way to identify who the actual person they are?
Anonymity doesn't change the equation. No one on hackernews knows who I am but I still want the recognition of my peers (upvotes) which is why I'm posting here. The fact that everyone ultimately wants peer-approval means we need to create participatory structures in which people are rewarded (with approval) for doing useful things. Stackoverflow is a perfect example of this. People gain karma by answering questions t…
You're leftyted, I see you!
People see different facets of our identity, only God sees all of them.
In some cases our limited online presence might represent a more authentic version of our 'true selves' than we present in [the rest of] "real life".
>"it will become near-impossible to find voices worth hearing" //
Isn't the OP saying there that we all have a voice worth hearing. You're right that it would be harder to find the voices we could extract the most value from; but realistically that's probably already impossible.
Re: Have a personal web site
#328I 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 have an exceedingly common first and last name
As you implied, that's kind of like a secret weapon. No bored middle manager can Google you and not hire you because they didn't like the wording of a DIY forum post about your plumbing 9 years ago.
Re: Have a personal web site
#329I 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…
> go out of date Pause for a moment on this one. Why would it go out of date? The oldest content currently listed on the front page of my website is from 2005. What is in it has not gone out of date in the slightest. In fact, nothing from the intervening fourteen years has gone out of date. I could probably dig back through archive.org and pick out some more from sites I had back in the 1990's that would still be per…
Maybe they mean things like commands to install software, command line arguments, dead URLs. Things like that change.
Re: Have a personal web site
#330I 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 don't think writing is just about communicating things to other people. It's also communicating things to yourself. I think the greatest value in writing things down is to order and articulate your own thoughts. Certainly in my own case, I never finish a large chunk of articles I start to write simply because during the research I find out I was wrong, or that things are more complex than I thought and I'm no longe…
This fits my experience as well. It’s always interesting to see what assumptions or unspecific placeholders I made that are fleshed out when actually writing.