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. :)

> 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)

More than two years ago, I wrote this:

[…]

What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine.

Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295456

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.

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!

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 service, my own email, and I'll host FTP, IRC, and other things as I want to. There's not much of a limit. This is nice and freeing. I decide how everything's presented and done; I use my own server software in some instances.

I can agree that having one's own website is an introduction to this manner of freedom, though.

For the past 4 years I've been too busy and have only written a couple of articles on Medium[1]. Thankfully I'm ending my current job which has consumed my time, energy, and soul for far too long and I want to get into the habit of writing again. This time on my personal site, not on Medium.

[1] https://medium.com/@Pier

I think (hope) in the next years we will see an increase of personal sites. With products like Ghost, it's easier for everyone to make one and it doesn't involve a ton of coding. You can focus on the content and own everything. I wonder if we'll be able to connect these personal sites together like a crowdsourced Medium?

Edit: I'm talking about self hosted Ghost

If you want to make a website accessible to any human but essentially invisible to search engines, configure basic authentication to require and accept any username and/or password, and then set the auth description to “Enter anything to continue”.

Human beings will enter anything and read your article, with the browser caching the credentials for a while, but the vast majority of search engines will treat the 401 as “indexing not permitted under law”, to a degree that your site might not even be returned as a result at all.

Robots.txt doesn’t have the same effect and is soundly ignored by many malicious/uncaring web spiders and tools, unlike 401.

It seems like the smallest thing in the world, but it’s why forums that require you to login to search are so safe against harassment - as long as they block web spidering!

Ive found myself spending a bit more time on YouTube recently and I've been curious as to why. I've come to the conclusion that I much enjoy consuming something that someone, or at least small group of people, care about and find that a lot of good information can be shared. (It also helps in that regard that I've been watching wood ajd metal working channels.)

So, why not websites and just ddg or Google subjects? The more I thought about it and paid attention, the more I realized that top results are all large sites with next to no content and finding those personal websites, those labous of love filled with information is neigh impossible.

I miss being able to find those smaller sites organically.

At least in academia the tradition is still going strong.

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? Get a stage name vs a tech name? Create a unified portfolio as a creative technologist?

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?

There are so many cool personal sites out there. I'm constantly amazed by the quality and creativity.

I publish now from dropbox. Ofc using my own tool https://docs.montaigne.io. It's already helped me do add content more freequently

What's interesting about this is Tobias, the author, earns a living making an awesome skin for wordpress called Semplice. I've been using Semplice for the past couple years and as a designer who used to code, it makes making my portfolio site a heck of a lot easier. There's still a lot of time sunk into it. I just don't have to fuss with some of the details. So in theory, he helps me keep my personal site alive, even if I am now using the crutch of WP.

I love my website too, and personal websites in general. Mine is also handcrafted (well, I have a few scripts to help me but all the HTML and CSS are written by hand). I also maintain and host a little service that allow my friends and friends of friends to have and easily manage a personal website, in particular for those in academia (but outside CS).

If you would like to be easily found by people geographically near you, you can add yourself to its-near.me We are currently looking for personal websites to add. Let me know if you have any questions. https://its-near.me

Loving the irony of having links to Instagram and Twitter in the footer of that post :P

In an effort to get people to bring back the blog, I started https://startablog.com - to do just that.

We actually offer to set up people's blogs for free here - http://startablog.com/free-blog (and are hoping to help 10,000 people do it).

I know WP blogs are not always the favorite of the HN crowd, but Wordpress has been super accessible (esp for newbies) once things are setup, so hopefully we can remove that first (slightly technical) obstacle for the crowd that's used to doing something on everyone else's platform.

I have a personal website. It's very easy to forget that 99% of people have no interest in making their own personal sites, never had, and never will. That's not a bad thing. Making your own site is a weird, niche thing to do -- a lot of work for no concrete reward.

In the past, the internet was dominated by people in that very strange 1%. The advent of social media didn't remove them, it just let everybody else in. The few that want to make their own sites still do, using platforms or tools that are far more convenient than a decade ago.

Yeah. The goog really did assist in breaking up "my links" on all of those old sites. I presume it was just an accident of the company who did "no harm".

Facebook is the industrialization of personal information which has its pros and cons.

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.

I loathe video for learning.

And most of the time when I'm web browsing, I do not want anything with sound.

You could always start old-school Mosaic (with the tiniest bit of HTML5):

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html lang="en">
      <head>
        <title>Rafuino's site</title>
      </head>
      <body>
        <h1>Rafuino's site</h1>
        <p>Welcome!</p>
        <p><i>Under Construction</i></p>
      </body>
    </html>

It won't necessarily be displayed as serifed type, with raster aliasing, on gray, but you could CSS that in. :)

I recently started a blog to write about my experience learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. One of the best choices I made was using the bundled WordPress theme, twentynineteen, and not worrying about design. It's been pretty liberating and for now I'm just focused on content. I'll revisit the design at some point but worrying about the design in the beginning is almost like not learning to play guitar because you don't have a band name yet. Just start putting content up, the design will or won't come. Good luck!!

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 and improved the static site generator, but the design is still a bit rubbish!

Once its ready, I'll be happy to add it to our platform. It lets one find and connect with people nearby. https://its-near.me

This is an easy paralysis to fall into. Unless you know you need something more, just start by getting some useful content up in plain HTML.

I'm also in tech and music, though music is not a full time career for me. My personal website starts with a landing page and two links, one for the tech stuff, and the other for the music stuff.

I wrote my site by hand in plain HTML, just over 2 decades ago, have added some content but have not radically changed it. Anything that's more than 1 level deep pulls up a PDF of something or other. Maintenance is via FTP.

It still works on every browser, phone, OS, etc.

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 focused (https://joshimbriani.com). I've been pretty pleased with the setup for now seeing as how I can nerd out about coasters without alienating the other half of my (non-existent) audience

    http://localhost:4000/

If you aren't trying to use your site as a sales and marketing platform, then just put them on different pages. The only reason you wouldn't put up all this stuff on the same overall site is if you are trying to maintain focus to optimize a conversion funnel.

> I’d be really grateful to see an example.

I'm a front-end web developer, here's my website: https://tobireif.com/ .

All hand-coded (no premade templates for example, all custom). Some text about me, demo-index with non-boxy design https://tobireif.com/demos/ (layout: mainly Flexbox), a simple index of posts https://tobireif.com/posts/ , contact data, that's mostly it.

> I have a career in tech and also a career in music.

> Just make two sites [...] ?

Yep, that sounds advisable. Good luck!

I wrote my own in php years ago... ewams.net

Most of the things I post are not directly tied to my current job but more of things I am interested in, like the cpu sizing tool I wrote http://ewams.net/specintd/ or web scraping, security, data integrity, etc. Just something to store my research in really.

Just get started!

Only if you want your professional interests to be separate.

Just have one web page dedicated to your tech portfolio, and another web page dedicated to music. Or even a whole section of your website.

Or have two separate websites hosted on the same IP address or not.

Personally I prefer PHP and using includes for menus, footers, or sidebars.

I use a static site generator called Hugo. All my web pages are markdown and Hugo turns them into HTML and applies a theme I chose. Great for if the content on your site is all static.

umvirate.com

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