Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website • Hacker News Board

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#61

Post by lazlee » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #54

SamBam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random question, since your site came up: what do your kids use to make their personal pages? Thinking of doing something similar with my 7-year-old and 4-year-old this fall.

They dictate and I type plain html + css. Sometimes they ask for complicated things (like when Lily first wanted polka dots) and I look it up. Lily's Inxed page and RSS feed are from a script I wrote that does it manually: https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/lilyrs... I wrote about this some here: https://www.jefftk.com/p/helping-the-kids-post

Haha ... Lily's blog is great. Good job, Dad.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#62

Post by ehonda » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

ryantgtg wrote: post #57

ehonda wrote: post #24

wiby.me - a search engine for websites similar to what OP is looking for

wiby.me appears to be a search engine for web pages, not websites. On their submission form, if you are submitting a blog they ask that you submit link to a specific post, and not the index. That was enough to dissuade me from submitting my personal site. I guess I just don't get it.

Yes its not everyone's cup of tea

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#63

Post by searchableguy » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #54

SamBam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random question, since your site came up: what do your kids use to make their personal pages? Thinking of doing something similar with my 7-year-old and 4-year-old this fall.

They dictate and I type plain html + css. Sometimes they ask for complicated things (like when Lily first wanted polka dots) and I look it up. Lily's Inxed page and RSS feed are from a script I wrote that does it manually: https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/lilyrs... I wrote about this some here: https://www.jefftk.com/p/helping-the-kids-post

I loved pony podcast lol.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#64

Post by leviathant » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #39

Much of my personal blog is actually ranked on Google for terms. I tend to keep my notes in my blog, I share it on HN and Reddit. It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge. My personal, unquantifiable goal, is saving a million man hours through my blog posts. So many things are implemented or explored, but never shared. Knowledge in a vacuum is useless to society. I wish more people woul…

>It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge.

It's such a long-term reward that can be hard to quantify when talking to people who operate in a "long-tail passive income" mindset.

I've kept my website about an obscure drum machine (the Boss DR-110) operating since 1999, I still get occasional emails about it, and I absolutely can see how what I've shared has shaped the drum machine ecosystem in little ways in the intervening years, from modifications people came up with and shared back, to hardware implementations from hobbyists, to the addition of its circuitry to modern mass-manufactured clones of similar hardware. Literally every copy of the schematics on the internet came from the service manual that I bought on eBay, photographed, and scanned from the negatives at what I thought was an absurdly high resolution at the time.

When my wife's M-Audio AV40 speakers developed a buzz, she found and replaced bad capacitors, and over the last seven years, has seen a stream of comments from people expressing thanks for showing them how to give their own problematic speakers new life.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#65

Post by ryantgtg » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

antasvara wrote: post #40

polote wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also this daily newsletter of hacker news blog posts https://hnblogs.substack.com

Can confirm that this newsletter is awesome. On a side note, the blogs that the newsletter links to often have no comments on Hacker News, meaning that I have often never seen them before.

And there's a reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#66

Post by brianzelip » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

merlinscholz wrote: post #6

dusted wrote: post #5

Webrings are back :D Put your personal sites in a webring! :)

Funny timing, I just blogged about webrings on my personal website a few days ago: https://merlinscholz.name/post/bring-back-the-old-web/

1) It's Drew DeVault, not Drev Devault (as listed multiple times throughout your site)

2) Would love if you made a link out of "Homelab" in your About Me sidebar, which linked to a post explaining what it is. I just read about a "homelab" on HN yesterday, and would like to know more!

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#67

Post by joshuaissac » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

dstick wrote: post #27

Did anyone else read this in David Attenborough's voice?

The style of writing reminds me of the works of Fravia, who used similar imagery in his searching guides.[1]

1. http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#68

Post by rikroots » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #56

lettergram wrote: post #39

Much of my personal blog is actually ranked on Google for terms. I tend to keep my notes in my blog, I share it on HN and Reddit. It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge. My personal, unquantifiable goal, is saving a million man hours through my blog posts. So many things are implemented or explored, but never shared. Knowledge in a vacuum is useless to society. I wish more people woul…

I actually would write more, if people would read it. Unfortunately, if I write a blog on my personal website, nobody is going to find it. And I don't like Medium for their policy of forcing people to paywall their content in return for visibility. If I post a link to a blog post on my website to Facebook, Facebook downranks it and doesn't show it to most of my friends (seriously, WTF). The only thing I can do is pos…

I don't write much on my blogs nowadays, but that's mainly because I lack inspiration. For the past few years my 'blogging' has mostly been long rambling rant-thoughts about obscure stuff on Facebook: it gives my friends something to chuckle about.

When I do write proper blog posts, the lack of an audience doesn't bother me anymore. It is (as they say) what it is. It's also liberating: I can write what I like without fear of reprisal or the need to justify myself - an online occasional diary, if you like. Last year I built a new website to collect together all my writing work. I included some blog functionality in it and rescued a bunch of posts from old Blogger blogs. It was fun to read them all again[1].

I, too, loathe Medium's business model. If I see a potentially interesting post here on HN which links to that site, I've taught myself not to click the link.

[1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#69

Post by technothrasher » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

I remember the good old days when personal websites ruled the web. I even found mine listed in the Netscape daily "rants and raves" directory for jokingly professing my undying love for Lindsay Wagner.

That listing led to a local newspaper reporter contacting me for a story about people who had web pages. I had a nice big quote in the article about how this new medium broke down the barriers to publishing and allowed all us common people to have our own voice broadcast out without needing to play the big publishers games or having to worry about the finances involved in publishing content.

I suppose much of that is still alive today, though definitely yoked by the social media companies' stranglehold on content publication by the masses.

Re: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

#70

Post by fancyfish » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 11:48 PM UTC

brianzelip wrote: post #66

merlinscholz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny timing, I just blogged about webrings on my personal website a few days ago: https://merlinscholz.name/post/bring-back-the-old-web/

1) It's Drew DeVault, not Drev Devault (as listed multiple times throughout your site) 2) Would love if you made a link out of "Homelab" in your About Me sidebar, which linked to a post explaining what it is. I just read about a "homelab" on HN yesterday, and would like to know more!

Thank you. The lack of the capital V also turned me off as a potential user of the site. Not only was it wrong once, but multiple times. I think it's mistakes like these that need to be really examined as a site owner.