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A Love Letter to Personal Websites

vanschneider.com

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Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#11

Post by neilv »

One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc.

My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve URLs for some open source contributions. It's also personal, with none of my professional work on it.

I'd bet the vintage look has cost me a few business opportunities, but not every aspect of my life has to follow this year's commercial fashion. Shoot me if I ever give my little personal site a stock React look, or a big dynamic anti-Web framework, or third-party CDNs to mitigate bloat hosting costs, or something like that. :)

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#12

Post by btbytes »

neilv wrote: post #6
Rafuino wrote: post #3

Finally bought myself a personal domain but am now currently agonizing over how to design the damn thing, let alone what to actually put on there!

You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5): Rafuino's site Rafuino's site Welcome! Under Construction It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on gray, but you could CSS that in. :)

This is good advice. I'm collecting websites like this ("handmade") here - https://www.btbytes.com/websites.html

My own website is compiled together with a python script, but aesthetically close to what you describe.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#13

Post by Kye »

Something even more pernicious about social media: if you build an audience there, you're trapped. You can easily convince yourself a lot of people care about what you say right up until you link to something more substantial off the silo.

The ActivityPub fediverse is a lot better about this, but even there I might get one visit to a linked page for every ten boosts.

Getting people to look at a website in 2019 is hard. It used to be easier. I could get 1000 people to look at a blog post on just about anything. Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away. You might get lucky and land on a long tail keyword that Google ranks you for, but search traffic is unpredictable even if you go out of your way to research keywords.

I get 140k views a month and tons of retweets/likes on Twitter when I'm active. The website has a few posts with some search traffic, but nothing like 140k.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#14

Post by state_less »

neilv wrote: post #11

One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc. My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve UR…

I really enjoyed the look of your site and hope you don't trade it in for another cookie cutter site like so many others.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#15

Post by reaperducer »

kylek wrote: post #7
neilv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5): Rafuino's site Rafuino's site Welcome! Under Construction It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on gray, but you could CSS that in. :)

You forgot and (and some sick midi tunes)

You forgot and (and some sick midi tunes)

Thanks to CSS animations, you can recreate and .

I use it to recreate the Amiga's Guru Meditation Error when I'm debugging web sites.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#16

Post by movedx »

qubyte wrote: post #8
Rafuino wrote: post #3

Finally bought myself a personal domain but am now currently agonizing over how to design the damn thing, let alone what to actually put on there!

Don't worry about the design. That can come later. Just get a single, well formed HTML page up there with a few words. Once you have that the design and content problems will seem less insurmountable. I spent years agonising. I even wrote my own Node.js framework before I finally realised it was all procrastination, and put together a static site and deployed it in a few minutes. Over the years I've added features an…

Looks great! What static engine did you go with, if any?

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#17

Post by movedx »

Kye wrote: post #13

Something even more pernicious about social media: if you build an audience there, you're trapped. You can easily convince yourself a lot of people care about what you say right up until you link to something more substantial off the silo. The ActivityPub fediverse is a lot better about this, but even there I might get one visit to a linked page for every ten boosts. Getting people to look at a website in 2019 is har…

> Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away.

This is very true. I've got a YouTube channel and I'm developing premium training solutions on the side of it in Podia... video is king.

People want high value (to learn something) wrapped in high quality and compacted into a 5-10 (max) minute video. And they want it for free... sigh.

Remember, though, that Google is the #1 search engine, so blogging (and SEO) is still important to drive traffic towards your videos. That being said videos will take over.

I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I believe it said in the next 5-10 years at least three billion people are coming online and they want video, because video is how they want to consume knowledge.

I think people should start picking up a camera.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#18

Post by 52-6F-62 »

neilv wrote: post #11

One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc. My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve UR…

Cheers on the note “my professional work isn’t here”. Makes me wonder if I should be more explicit like that.

I have to side with you on this.

And I do use those modern frameworks at work.

My goal was to keep mine working coherently in Lynx, but uses some JS for syntax highlighting and a click event or two that degrade well enough.

It’s also an awful hacked together static-ish blog in Go behind Nginx. I was working on an improvement last night and realized how much I’d learned since I wrote it. It’s funny and frustrating at the same time. Might be time to start over again.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#19

Post by 52-6F-62 »

kylek wrote: post #7
neilv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5): Rafuino's site Rafuino's site Welcome! Under Construction It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on gray, but you could CSS that in. :)

You forgot and (and some sick midi tunes)

Dammit you beat me to it!

I second this. And a few stolen animated gifs. You know, for posterity.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#20

Post by Kye »

movedx wrote: post #17
Kye wrote: post #13

Something even more pernicious about social media: if you build an audience there, you're trapped. You can easily convince yourself a lot of people care about what you say right up until you link to something more substantial off the silo. The ActivityPub fediverse is a lot better about this, but even there I might get one visit to a linked page for every ten boosts. Getting people to look at a website in 2019 is har…

> Now all the eyes are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can't pry them away. This is very true. I've got a YouTube channel and I'm developing premium training solutions on the side of it in Podia... video is king. People want high value (to learn something) wrapped in high quality and compacted into a 5-10 (max) minute video. And they want it for free... sigh. Remember, though, that Google is the #1 search…

It sounds like you're talking about one specific kind of content: educational material. That's not what I make or have any interest in making.

And there is no way I'd get on camera even if I wanted to do video. I do not believe video will come to dominate such that text and audio won't still have a place. I personally can't get much out of most non-fiction videos, and I know I'm not alone. I didn't even watch more than 0-2 YouTube videos a month until I found ContraPoints and got pulled into lefttube.

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