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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

371–380 of 436 posts

Re: Have a personal web site

#371

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.

It would also index a lot of excellent .gov sites that get buried by SEO junk

Re: Have a personal web site

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...that's a pretty good idea, actually. I'd bet that in some way, shape, or form, search engines probably already have the ability to detect presence of advertising. The question is how they work it into the relevancy formula given that the big two search engines are at the same time the big two ad networks.

I wonder if you can just make an extension to filter these out of the google results. Adblocker extensions certainly don't have a hard time detecting ads in webpages.

Re: Have a personal web site

#373
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My quotes file recently reached 1MB of plain text, 160,257 words. I started this file 17 years ago! This is enough to fill three average sized novels! One day... I might have a go at weaving a narrative through it.

recently came across http://jrnl.sh/

Vimwiki [1] is probably also worth a mention because it has a neat diary feature as well. Jrnl appears to have more diary specific features, but Vimwiki also worked well so far for my (probably rather basic) needs.

[1]: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

Re: Have a personal web site

#374
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> When I give people a link they can't click on […] Try giving them a QR code instead.

"Weird, I couldn't add you on snapchat with your code"

Re: Have a personal web site

#375

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…

>.. we'd be living in huts. As someone who has actually lived in a hut, I would like you to know that living in huts should not be used as a derogatory example. In fact hut living was the best time of my life and I long to replicate the simplicity and freedom it afforded.

Care to share more about this? Eg, when, where, why?

Re: Have a personal web site

#377
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know how well that's enforced. There's an ocean full of HR tech startups that are doing just that programmatically, to produce scores on all sorts of things to rate candidates.

Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence. If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.

> violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence

No they shouldn't. What they should do though is geoblock all access coming to their sites and services which they can identify as coming from EU origin, plus add to their site EULA that anyone under EU jurisdiction is not authorized to use their site under any circumstances and such access will be considered unauthorized access, which is a criminal act.

> If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them

That's two of the most likely sources of lies. Neither has much value.

Re: Have a personal web site

#378
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.

Except that makes it super easy for anyone to fill that void. Someone who you've pissed off could write some trash about you and it would become the #1 result on google.

Re: Have a personal web site

#379

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 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. My wife and I are fairly boring people. I'm a sysadmin and fill-in sales rep at work, she works for the l…

> I have more fun doing the hobby itself than I would writing about it.

This is a real problem.

I tend to always have at least one hobby project going on that I know would be of interest to a wide group of people (such as the smartphone I'm currently building).

However, I don't like to document the projects as I go along, because it makes the project more difficult and time-consuming to accomplish, and I start to feel pressure to make sure that I'm providing regular updates -- which turns the hobby into a sort of job.

Instead, I prefer to document dump all my notes and sketches, and put the code and schematics up, after I've completed the project entirely. This means that I don't have a great deal of "work in progress" photos and the like, and that my post is not useful for people who want to see the process of development itself, but it's a compromise that works for me.

Re: Have a personal web site

#380

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…

When I searched for your name, it came up second in Google, first in DuckDuckGo and first in Bing. Not sure how the interviewer managed to miss it, both the site and your GitHub profile are in the top two results for your name.
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