Ask HN: Care to share your personal site?

16 points by poletopole 4 years ago | 28 comments

As embarrassing as it sounds, I've never really understood the advantage of having a personal site over the possible downsides.

On one hand, if you're a professional, you have a reputation to build, but on the other hand anonymity never really was a problem for me professionally.

At any rate, I'm considering giving making a personal site a try, I just am not convinced what the pros and cons really are. This actually may be hard to ask of others, as I know many of us here do prefer to remain anonymous, to greater or lesser extent.

I appreciate anyone whom does share their site, since I'm curious what a personal/professional programmer site might look like. Or if anyone whom just has solid advice about my questions is welcome to share it.

I know many of us just use github, more or less, as their means of building a professional reputation--but a part of me distrusts social media, even if it's github of all things.

But I'm also curious about what stack was used to make your site. I've looked at static site generators, but none I found felt right to me. I guess it's one of those cases where if there is no clear winner, then the problem hasn't really been solved yet.

miguendes 4 years ago |

https://miguendes.me

I write mostly about Python and everything related to it. I decided to create a blog because I wanted to improve my writing skills, English is not my first language and writing in English would be an opportunity to improve it, hopefully.

I'm trying to be consistent and I release two articles a month, one every other week.

The first version I used Hugo but I noticed that I was spending a long time tweaking it and not writing a single word. Then I found https://hashnode.com and gave it a go. They are a blogging as a service and it abstracts away most of the things that I was fighting with. The downsides is that it's not fully configurable but that's the price I decided to pay. But for basic stuff like domain name, analytics, newsletter it works out the box.

domano 4 years ago |

https://gomano.de

It is in German, sorry.

I wanted to have an aesthetically pleasing representation of my professional persona with my favourite color scheme.

Actually I have it on GitHub: https://github.com/domano/homepage-2021

Nextjs Tailwind Private 4 node k3s cluster with DNS Round robin.

susam 4 years ago |

https://susam.in/maze/

This was the first website I ever wrote in my life back in my engineering study days during 2001-2005. It was originally written in plain handcrafted HTML + CSS. Some of the server side scripts were written in Classic ASP back then.

Now it is just a static blog generated by my own Common Lisp program. The comment form is served by Common Lisp + Hinchentoot. All HTML and CSS is still handcrafted. Check out the source code at https://github.com/susam/maze.

For me this has been a quick way to share notes, thoughts, experiments, etc.

protoduction 4 years ago |

My personal site does the job (https://guido.io), it lists some old and current projects and it allows me to post some snippets of knowledge every now and then as a blog. There are a hundred ways I want to improve it, but it is rarely at the top of my priority list.

I started with just some HTML and CSS, and later shoe-horned it into a Hugo template which required some awful custom theme hacks.

> But I'm also curious about what stack was used to make your site. I've looked at static site generators, but none I found felt right to me. I guess it's one of those cases where if there is no clear winner, then the problem hasn't really been solved yet.

It's fairly simple to create your own static site generator in any programming language with different tradeoffs, I think that is one of the main reasons why there are so many out there. It's about the content and your visitors won't care which framework you used anyway - so just pick one and be done with it. You can port your content over if you ever want to switch.

mkranjec 4 years ago |

Sharing mine as well. http://mariokranjec.dev

Due to personal reasons had to pause publishing for quite some time. Had really encouraging talk this week with one of the more visible members of my local tech community who shared some really actionable blogging tips with me.

If you are looking for an accountability buddy blogging wise feel free to ping me.

BruceBlacklaws 4 years ago |

https://www.BruceBlacklaws.com/

This is my app portfolio and interactive CV

- App and all backend APIs scale to zero (Cloud Run is hosted Knative)

- PHP WebSocket server used by the chat application (single instance of PHP CLI maintains app state) with a chatbot that is integrated into Google Dialogflow

- Zero-cost asynchronous worker runs for the lifespan of the running WebSocket server container

- Server-side rendering implemented using Symfony Twig

- MVC without the M (clear separation of concern/backend components)

- RequireJS implemented on the frontend

- CV integrated into the Request Interview API that ships as a microservice

asicsp 4 years ago |

I write my books in markdown and convert to pdf/epub/web using pandoc and mdbook. I find markdown easier to work with and I don't know much about web development. So, I use Zola (https://github.com/getzola/zola) for my blog (https://learnbyexample.github.io/). It is a static site generator, clone a theme you like and start writing posts in markdown.

adamhorne 4 years ago |

Here's my site. I work at a communication school. I've noticed we often get the usual suspects into the comms industry - so I'm trying to help fix that a little bit (for free) (https://adamhorne.com/outsiders/)

As a designer I would find myself messing with the design all the time, I told myself that I had to use the default WordPress theme with a tiny amount of little CSS tweaks (font size, color) and that that it. The good thing is that it updates seamlessly.

randomluck040 4 years ago | |

I don’t know where I would fall on the spectrum between insider and outsider, just wanted to let you know that I think what you’re doing is great. Have a nice one!

seanwilson 4 years ago |

Here's mine: https://www.seanw.org/ :)

Netlify + Hugo + minimal CSS + minimal JavaScript.

It's more for generating leads for freelance website/app design work but I want to try to get into blogging at some point.

I would recommend Hugo. It's simple, super fast and not overloaded with distracting setup and features. You shouldn't need much besides a landing page + blog page with shared header and footer. Don't overthink it.

ron9 4 years ago |

https://ronitray.xyz/

I write mostly about random nonsense but I do want to get more technical eventually. This is my first year blogging in a long time so it's mostly been about getting into the groove and developing a voice.

Using a very basic static site generator written in Python, very less CSS and minimal HTML templates.

I have another account that I use HN not tied to my name.

cpach 4 years ago |

My site is here: https://hsm.tunnel53.net/

If you want to try Hugo out, feel free to clone this repo: https://github.com/cpach/piper – It’s a very simple skeleton and you don’t even need a theme for it.

For hosting I warmly recommend AWS Amplify + GitHub.

vereis 4 years ago |

You can find my site at cbailey.co.uk (it's my first time sharing it online!)

It's a pretty informal blog (and it's very unpolished). It's a standard Elixir/Phoenix app which polls GitHub Issues which is actually where my blog posts are stored (I'm basically leveraging it to do syntax highlighting, markdown to HTML compilation and eventually comments)

luxpir 4 years ago | |

That's cool, never seen that done before. You should write it up!

Make your link clickable if you still can. Or here, I'll do it if not: https://cbailey.co.uk/

neemeizdabest 4 years ago |

My personal/hobby website, w/o any stack

https://petmanson.com

karmakaze 4 years ago |

https://blog.keithkim.org

I set it up on GitBook, wrote a few posts then lost interest for a long while. Maybe I'll have something new to post again. The last thing I posted (I think) was about keyboard layouts and what matters or doesn't.

gidorah 4 years ago |

https://www.huginn.uk

Written in pure HTML, no CSS. I wrote a Python script to combine and minimize some of the HTML parts, so that I could have constant header/nav elements without copy and pasting.

maxilevi 4 years ago |

I've successfully used mine as a more visually appealing showcase of my sideprojects. https://maxilevi.com/projects

Regarding the stack, it's just a simple NextJS app hosted on Netlify.

schwartzworld 4 years ago |

https://schwartz.world

I bought the domain forever ago. It's just my little corner of the internet. Sometimes I do blog posts, sometimes I create pages to share pictures or use for evites.

skydhash 4 years ago |

https://hescaide.me/

Works better than a resume if you're already communicating with a potential client. Also better when you want friends to refer you.

mindcrime 4 years ago |

It's a little bit out of date, and not hosted on a personally owned domain, but this is what I have right now:

https://mindcrime.github.io/

DataCrayon 4 years ago |

Here is mine https://datacrayon.com

I use a static site generator that I've modified with features that I needed!

mooreds 4 years ago |

Mine is mostly old stuff + a wordpress blog I keep up: https://www.mooreds.com/

hurnhu 4 years ago |