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A Love Letter to Personal Websites

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Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#51

Post by mirimir »

JohnFen wrote: post #23
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…

> 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. I avoid that by not using my real name on my personal site.

Indeed. Forgot to mention that, I did.

Given that I mainly publish Tor onion sites, it's mostly all plain HTML. Because it's faster via Tor, with less back and forth. I did, under pressure, do one clearnet site with a CSS library, and multiple classes with different column layouts. But I make no pretense about website skills.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#52

Post by mooreds »

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…

Mine is super basic: http://mooreds.com/

I find that nowadays 98% of my time and effort on the personal website is on the blog. I've thought about trashing the rest, but still have some old links to papers and resources I put together years ago that I can be bothered to update. One of these days...

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#53

Post by kevingrahl »

maverick2007 wrote: post #32
crustacean wrote: post #24

Can anyone give advice about how you built your personal website(s?) while having strong professional interests in multiple areas? I’d be really grateful to see an example. I have a career in tech and also a career in music. My professional networks in these areas don’t overlap. I don’t think everyone responds positively to the dual career thing, although some definitely do. Just make two sites and don’t link them? G…

I did something a similar except instead of music I'm a huge theme park fan and wanted a portion of my personal site to be dedicated to my trips (instead of hosting the pictures on Facebook or the like) so I decided to separate out the roller coaster portion of my persona and put it at a subdomain of my personal site ( https://coasters.joshimbriani.com for those curious) whereas my main site remains mostly tech focus…

Hey Josh!

Did you realize that your feed.xml seems to only link to

    http://localhost:4000/
instead of linking to your website like it should?

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#54

Post by onemoresoop »

btbytes wrote: post #12
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. :)

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.

I got lost for almost an hour in this little collection of yours. Bookmarked.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#55

Post by saagarjha »

mirimir wrote: post #48

I've done many personal websites, and the discussion forum or two, over the years. And more or less without exception, the lack of engagement has been disheartening. But (of course, I guess) most of them were Tor onion sites, so silence was predictable. But even on clearnet, promoting personal websites is nontrivial. How does one do it?

Put things that would interest others, and let others find it. If you’re feeling brave, you can link to it in an appropriate context. For example, in this thread sharing my own personal website might be relevant: https://saagarjha.com

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#56

Post by saagarjha »

crustacean wrote: post #24

Can anyone give advice about how you built your personal website(s?) while having strong professional interests in multiple areas? I’d be really grateful to see an example. I have a career in tech and also a career in music. My professional networks in these areas don’t overlap. I don’t think everyone responds positively to the dual career thing, although some definitely do. Just make two sites and don’t link them? G…

Tags?

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#57

Post by saagarjha »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #21

I agree with the general idea, but dislike the WWW. I find it fundamentally poor from the start. I'd rather make the comparison to having one's own node on the Internet. I rent a server and I rent several DNS names. Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet. Through this, I'm able to host a website, a Gopher hole, a Finger…

> Unfortunately, neither of these things are protected in a way that would prevent them from being taken from me, but it's not happened yet.

It’s one of the more resilient platforms out there, at least considered to company-hosted social media sites.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#58

Post by saagarjha »

mandarg wrote: post #40
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…

For what one person's opinion is worth, I quite like the look of old-style text-and-hyperlink websites, so long as there's something interesting to read on them. A canonical example: http://bactra.org/

I found that website a bit small on mobile, though Reader Mode fixed it up quite nicely.

Re: A Love Letter to Personal Websites

#60

Post by unicornporn »

> written from years of thinking on the subject

While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of personal websites, this post did nothing for me. So many words and so little to add.

These texts are slightly related and did something more:

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my...

http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html

http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/ (don't miss part 2 and three)

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