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. :)
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.
A while back I got fed up, spent about 15-20 minutes writing some basic html, and came up with a simple page. I haven't looked back since. https://danielvaughn.github.io/info/
A canonical example: http://bactra.org/
https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
It also includes 'lite' variants of some news sites and such. A great reprieve from the heavy, popup and overlay infested web.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.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...
I avoid that by not using my real name on my personal site.
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.
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)
[…]
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.
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.
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.
With those two purposes in mind, just write, when you feel like it.
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.
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.
And most of the time when I'm web browsing, I do not want anything with sound.
<!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>
My own website is compiled together with a python script, but aesthetically close to what you describe.
Ah ah, more seriously, this is a great template to copy paste so just a heads up: don't forget <meta charset="utf-8"/> before <title>.
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!
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.
It’s one of the more resilient platforms out there, at least considered to company-hosted social media sites.
Congrats on making a positive career change.
Edit: I'm talking about self hosted Ghost
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!
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
a new kid on the block:
Then, almost every teacher and researcher did have their own website behind "~username" on the open web. For most it was just a list of publications and courses they taught. For these courses they often made an overview page with links to all kinds of interesting material, from lecture notes, old exams, literature, to tools, thoughts, and curiosities. Some went all out and made a personalized personal web page with all kinds of interesting content. I spend a lot of time browsing and reading and exploring these pages when I was a student. Now I wished I had downloaded them all.
Now, no-one but some old-timers do have a "~username" web page. Courses and their materials are hidden away behind the walls of the learning management system we use. Their publications are visible via the library's repository and bibliographical system. For the rest, everything that is on the open web on the university's servers is published via the corporate content management system with rules and regulation what and how to post and most employees do not have access to edit anyway. Many researchers are part of some academic social networks like researchgate, but that's outside the scope of the university's servers.
What is left is for those who are interested to share to setup their own websites elsewhere. Not many do, unfortunately.
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 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.
Did you realize that your feed.xml seems to only link to
http://localhost:4000/
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!
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!
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.
umvirate.com
But even on clearnet, promoting personal websites is nontrivial. How does one do it?
I publish now from dropbox. Ofc using my own tool https://docs.montaigne.io. It's already helped me do add content more freequently
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.