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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

883 pointsmarkchristian414 comments

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk your ear off about the places I've been and the things I've done, but if I'm objective about it, none of it is particularly praiseworthy, and it's hardly going to make me stand out to a potential employer. Any attempt to dramatize my life or skills is going to reek of pomposity, even the rare bits that are somewhat unique.

I'm not a designer. I'm not a visual person. Any attempt to fashionably describe myself is going to backfire. My resume is a good overview of my skills and experience, but if I try to turn that into an online portfolio, it's not going to be any more impressive. If I don't keep it up to date, and remodel it constantly to keep up with contemporary fashions, it's going to make me look old and out of touch.

I have an exceedingly common first and last name, so I'm hard for employers to find online. I'm happy about this. I don't want employers scrutinizing my social media presence, as benign as it is. I would never give a potential employer any of my online IDs if they asked.

If you've got something to say or show and you want your own home page, go for it. I don't think most people actually have enough interesting content to warrant it, though, and I'm pretty sure that I don't.

I actually feel the opposite. People do seem to be interested in the stuff I do, but the idea of creating a blog to brag about it is pretty horrifying to me.

Instead, I just send pictures of the stuff to those closest to me via SMS or other social networks, and call it a day. I don't need the whole world to know about my personal interests.

If I decide to try to make money from any of those hobbies, then I would start a blog or portfolio for that, but that'd be business, not personal.

So true. The vast majority of the web must surely be out of date, uninteresting, and not worth keeping.

> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off (even though I do include my side projects etc.), but to write about specific issues I managed to solve. As a software developer, I'm googling for problems all the time. 95% of the time I land on StackOverflow or GitHub issues. But it's about those 5% that I find a blog post which really helps me. My goal was to contribute back the same way.

If you don't like to actively maintain a blog, just set up a GitHub repo + GitHub Pages (or even go for plain GitHub Gists). As long as the information can be found via a search engine, it's good enough.

Finally - don't create a blog just because you feel obliged to. It's totally fine as a developer not to have a blog.

> My goal was to contribute back the same way.

YES! So much of our computing-related triumphs come from documentation that other people wrote. Even super basic stuff that no senior developer or sysadmin would dream of asking, that stuff still needs to be written down by someone.

I have a dozen or so Markdown documents of varying sizes that I need to finish, proof and polish before putting them online. I sorely lacking in motivation (and sleep)

Release the documents first, then finish or polish them. If you get bored with them, someone else might want to finish them off or extend them. But unless you publish them, they're only benefiting you. You might also find more motivation if they're already out there.

My quotes file recently reached 1MB of plain text, 160,257 words.

I started this file 17 years ago!

This is enough to fill three average sized novels!

One day... I might have a go at weaving a narrative through it.

What do you mean by quotes file?

It’s a text file where I’ve copy and pasted paragraphs and comments I’ve found interesting from books and online, and a few of my own thoughts.

Each entry is preceded by the date the entry was made, and followed by a reference to the source.

Because I’ve used some of the material multiple times I’m vaguely aware of the overall structure, and I use it as a bit of a knowledge-base.

As an example I’ll probably pop this comment in there later, so some of the materiel is mundane. Some of it seemed profound in the context of my life at the time, but might make less sense years later out of context.

I’ve only ever deleted a handful of entries in that 17 years.

I guess parts of it are a bit like a diary too, but I’ve never been very good at intentionally keeping a diary.

Once upon a time they called it a commonplace book

Pretty interesting that the roots of Evernote begin in Early Modern Europe.

I've been doing this for years (on paper, no less) without knowing that it had a name.

Edit: Here's an article that gave me some good ideas about different things to do with my book.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-...

I didn’t understand what the parent was trying to say until I read your comment.

Commomplace book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

I did the same sort of thing, but with quotes on paper. I took 30 years worth, organized them, and published the results as a book.

Link please. (:

recently came across http://jrnl.sh/

Vimwiki [1] is probably also worth a mention because it has a neat diary feature as well. Jrnl appears to have more diary specific features, but Vimwiki also worked well so far for my (probably rather basic) needs.

[1]: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

Out of curiosity, why not use a free platform like stack overflow or a github issue to publish your solutions?

There's nothing wrong with those options either. But some problems are opinionated or not specific enough for Stack Overflow (e.g. "what are the alternatives to include comments on a static site"). There's also the certainty that my content remains independent from other platforms and it remains available online as long as I keep paying for my server + domain.

Not the OP, but the reason that I don't use those platforms is, essentially, control. I don't trust any of them to exist forever, or to continue to operate in a way that works for me.

Keeping everything on a site that I am in control of eliminates the issues of uncertainty.

(I do answer direct questions on Stack Overflow and such, I just don't keep my accumulated works or investigative notes on third party sites.)

> The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off

That's what they all say.

Humans are social creatures and the main motivator for anyone to do anything in public is to "show off" or "be interesting". "All is vanity".

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Without a desire to compete, impress, prove our worth and so on we'd be living in huts. But it's something to be aware of and something that should be tempered.

I think the pendulum is swinging away from modesty plus self-reflection and towards "people documenting their lives in public".

I think your view is too cynical. People also can be motivated by altruism or by wanting to pay it forward. I've answered plenty of questions on facebook/reddit/etc. and do so because people have answered my questions in the past.

The part you are correct about is that it is easy to then get wrapped up in how many visitors your blog gets or how many upvotes your answer gets. Those vanity metrics definitely pull on the vanity strings. But, some people definitely do not care about "showing-off" when they put something up online.

> But, some people definitely do not care about "showing-off" when they put something up online.

If you don't care about showing off then you won't publish anything. People who are actually altruistic won't tell you about their altruism.

This isn't cynicism. The hunger for respect, admiration and recognition is not a bad thing. But it is necessary for people to understand what motivates them. And it is necessary for us to construct a society in which respect is earned by performing actions that are broadly beneficial to that society (as far as we can estimate, anyway).

Today, anyone can broadcast. But that doesn't mean that everyone should broadcast. The old gatekepers weren't perfect but they served a necessary purpose. Who are the new gatekeepers?

> If you don't care about showing off then you won't publish anything. People who are actually altruistic won't tell you about their altruism.

My point is that I think your thesis is too cynical. Many people start out writing their blogs or answer questions on public forums with the intent of trying to help other people out. The motivation can be of the form "I solved this problem and I am going to write about it because maybe my solution will save someone else time" rather than "I solved this problem and I am going to write about it so that everyone visits my website and I get famous." Maybe they become more motivated by vanity and blog metrics later on if their blog takes off. But, many people write stuff online with the intent to help others out and not solely out of hunger for respect, admiration and recognition.

> Today, anyone can broadcast. But that doesn't mean that everyone should broadcast. The old gatekepers weren't perfect but they served a necessary purpose. Who are the new gatekeepers?

You lost me here.

In my opinion, you try to make a distinction where is none. What is the difference between showing off and helping others in the context of technical questions on blogs/forums? Yes, you help others by providing solutions/advice for dificult problems. And you get satisfaction from the fact that you succeded where others stumbled and you let everybody know it by posting it online. You prove your value to a group of people, which gives you a feeling of inclusion -> important motivator.

In general, there is no such thing as altruism. You always get something out of helping others that keeps you going. Nobody is truly selfless. Altuists are the species which died out long time ago.

Meh, Ayn Rand is wrong, lots of people do things that they'd rather not be doing for the good of their family/friends/society. I'm not sure why so many people adhere to her antisocial musings. Sure some people only do things that only make them feel good. Altruism exists despite all the Randians attempts to morph it into something else so they can feel better about being greedy/self-centered/self-serving like them.

> If you don't care about showing off then you won't publish anything

I want to agree, but how can we explain near-anonymous StackOverflow profiles who have brilliant answers in them, but no way to identify who the actual person they are?

Anonymity doesn't change the equation. No one on hackernews knows who I am but I still want the recognition of my peers (upvotes) which is why I'm posting here.

The fact that everyone ultimately wants peer-approval means we need to create participatory structures in which people are rewarded (with approval) for doing useful things. Stackoverflow is a perfect example of this. People gain karma by answering questions that other people ask.

"Everyone should have a blog" is the opposite of this. It's feel-good nonsense along the lines of "everyone has their own subjective truth and all truths are equal". If we tell everyone to publish it will become near-impossible to find voices worth hearing. It's like saying you should answer every question on stackoverflow whether or not you know the answer.

You're leftyted, I see you!

People see different facets of our identity, only God sees all of them.

In some cases our limited online presence might represent a more authentic version of our 'true selves' than we present in [the rest of] "real life".

>"it will become near-impossible to find voices worth hearing" //

Isn't the OP saying there that we all have a voice worth hearing. You're right that it would be harder to find the voices we could extract the most value from; but realistically that's probably already impossible.

Most of my Stack Overflow karma has come from edits.

Just like in real life; I'll underwhelm the average sleuth with the amount of badges I have vs. the work I've actually done.

> Today, anyone can broadcast. But that doesn't mean that everyone should broadcast.

I don't agree here. Perhaps "not everything should be broadcast" might be better?

I agree that everyone should broadcast, just let me filter it on the input side.

> Who are the new gatekeepers?

I would posit that the new gatekeepers are algorithms. For example, Google search algorithms, Youtube recommendations, Facebook news feed Edgerank, etc.

I would up vote this.

There's a distinction between self promotion and genuine honest expression of who we are, what we presently think is true.

I feel like there is something fundamentally human when people try to do that with each other.

> the main motivator for anyone to do anything in public is to "show off" or "be interesting". "All is vanity".

I think that's demonstrably far too broad of a brush. Yes, this is a very common motivator, but it's hardly universal.

>.. we'd be living in huts.

As someone who has actually lived in a hut, I would like you to know that living in huts should not be used as a derogatory example. In fact hut living was the best time of my life and I long to replicate the simplicity and freedom it afforded.

Care to share more about this? Eg, when, where, why?

As a kid in the 80s born and lived in a traditional Yoruba village established within a forest in the South Carolina lowcountry.

I spent the first few memorable years of my life in a trailer park. I can relate. People have come and gone, I've certainly had "started from the bottom [now we here]" moments - but even at a young age - I saw honesty in ways I've never seen it since. The people were better, and I think it was because they were humble.

I love the diversity HN has. My wife also grew up in a tiny minimalistic house. We'd eat on the floor, no space for even a dining table. It was a lot of fun.

thats what stack overflow is for

I tried doing what the OP described, become some interesting blogger person, but threw in a 2 or 3 line article about some mundane error I had with a tool one day mixed in with all the other wordfluff.

Surprisingly the error code drew a ton of traffic compared to anything interesting I could have possibly thought about writing.

You stumbled upon a technical writing best practice. Always include the exact error code and message in documentation because people often search for that exact string.

Analogous: supply a link rather than tell someone to look it up.

and/or the exact text of the message. A vague search is fine if there are few matches,but there's a lot of cruft out there.

Agreed. I try to frame my posts to have helpful information first and foremost, for others in the same situations or even for my future self. Or for trip report type posts, for any others that were on the trip with me.

> But it's about those 5% that I find a blog post which really helps me. My goal was to contribute back the same way.

This is the main reason that I keep a personal website.

I tend to mix it up on my blog. If there is a problem I encounter, I write about the solution.

I also like to write about ideas I strung together that I sourced from books, podcasts, and other posts. I followed the same path as OP in regards to blogging in early 2000's then kinds letting my site languish. I have been trying to write a bit more over the last year.

I have found that checking out the analytics on the blog from time to time also helps me guage what topics to write about.

> As a software developer, I'm googling for problems all the time.

Who would learn more? The one who searches for answer or the one who answers questions?

Most of my website is my personal documentation. I write on my blog because I want to save something or archiving stuff.

I don't write for anyone, or because I think I'm an interesting person. If it help someone, good, but the main purpose is to help myself. I don't really write a lot and I don't think I should write on regular basis. I just write when I need it.

Of course you might not feel the need of doing that, but having that tool helped me a lot personnaly and professionnaly.

You should be more positive about yourself. You're interesting. I believe in you.

I just enjoy writing and when a topic is really on my mind it gives me an outlet. I honestly never thought anyone would read half the stuff I write but several things have made it here for big discussions. It was pretty fun and encouraging so I kept doing it.

Rather than a personal website, I think having an "nonpersonal" website ( or domain ) in order to learn and play around with technologies like ( web server, database, dns, networking, etc ) is better. Though I guess you could do all that locally within your own intranet.

At a contrast: I think lots of people have he problem that regardless of how interesting they are in the grand scheme, they are more interesting then they seem. So a blog becomes a good way to expose that.

If you think yourself less interesting than you seem, then perhaps being less known and is a better option :)

Fair points.

That said, I wonder if the things I find interesting, smart, or well articulated are thought of that way by the author. If the author knows it and I don't, maybe the author thinks it's obvious where I find it surprising.

> I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

My wife and I are fairly boring people. I'm a sysadmin and fill-in sales rep at work, she works for the local government. Our hobbies are run of the mill; she reads and reviews the books she's read, I tinker with embedded computing projects and niche operating systems, and in the past have written (but not published) short fiction.

She maintains a review blog she started a few years ago when she wanted to connect better with the authors and fellow reviewers she was in contact with on Facebook and Twitter. It has taken off as far as such sites can, and while it takes up a ton of her free time after work and on weekends, we balance with time together as well. She makes absolutely no money from it (she hates the idea of ads on her site) and honestly I agree with her; she would feel like it was a second job if she tried to monetize it. Still, she does it because she enjoys the back-and-forth she gets with authors, and she often gets to meet some of her personal heroes in real life at conventions and release parties. I'd say having a personal website has helped her feel fulfilled outside of a boring day job and I'm all for it, even though it means less time spent doing things together. It makes that time together even more precious and fulfilling.

Oh, and as for me...I did start a writing blog several years ago but writing fell to the wayside and I haven't posted anything in a couple of years. I've thought about ditching that altogether and blogging about embedded projects instead, but I have more fun doing the hobby itself than I would writing about it. I'm not a very social person and I don't have any social media accounts (unless this site and my sporadic activity on OSNews counts), and overall I feel I'm a pretty boring guy outside of niche circles. I'm also not job hunting nor am I in a hiring role at work, so I don't feel the need for my info to be out there.

These are not run of the mill hobbies.

I would be stoked to read about your projects with embedded systems or your unpublished short stories. Hell, even if they suck, that’s more authentic and more interesting than 99% of the internet right now.

Check your email :-)

> I have more fun doing the hobby itself than I would writing about it.

This is a real problem.

I tend to always have at least one hobby project going on that I know would be of interest to a wide group of people (such as the smartphone I'm currently building).

However, I don't like to document the projects as I go along, because it makes the project more difficult and time-consuming to accomplish, and I start to feel pressure to make sure that I'm providing regular updates -- which turns the hobby into a sort of job.

Instead, I prefer to document dump all my notes and sketches, and put the code and schematics up, after I've completed the project entirely. This means that I don't have a great deal of "work in progress" photos and the like, and that my post is not useful for people who want to see the process of development itself, but it's a compromise that works for me.

> I'm not that interesting

I disagree. Your thoughts on this topic have gone to the top of HN. To me, that implies you're interesting enough to be able to write thoughtful pieces that a bunch of other online armchair commentators agree with and upvote :)

Don't sell yourself short, friend!

Being able to write an interesting comment in response to a particular topic that frustrates you is not at all the same thing as having spontaneous interesting thoughts about enough topics to make a personal website/blog about it.

Plenty of blogs are nothing but interesting comments on topics that frustrate the author.

Even some of the most well known writings in computer science are just that, like the short article by some guy frustrated with everyone using goto instead of functions/while/for/etc (the article that inspired countless "... considered harmful" headlines).

I recently wrote a blog about “Dutch Oven Fried Chicken”[1], I don’t think it’s particularly interesting and anyone can do it. However, now I can send a link to a friend and go back and make the recipe myself.

Blogging for me isn’t about popularity. It’s about being able to share ones ideas and document your interests. I send links to my blog all the time, because I wrote about topics I found challenging / fun. I don’t think it’s the best, but it is my own thoughts.

Speaking of which... I’ve written about learning through storytelling[2] and blogging[3].

[1] https://austingwalters.com/dutch-oven-fried-chicken/

[2] https://austingwalters.com/how-storytelling-effects-learning...

[3] https://austingwalters.com/learning-through-blogging/

> I don’t think it’s particularly interesting and anyone can do it. However, now I can send a link to a friend and go back and make the recipe myself.

I used to have a blog or two back in the day and two things I noted back then was:

1. If I figured something out that I hadn't found a solution to elsewhere on the net people would find their way to my site. No further SEO necessary. (I don't know if this would work anymore.)

2. Sometimes I would Google [0] a weird problem and find my own page.

[0]: yep, that's what I did until three years ago or so)

Edit:

FTR I never made any money on this. It wasn't that popular.

Also I recently started writing again at https://erik.itland.no just to contribute some stupid posts like those you'd find on the old web I used to like. Hopefully I can start adding some links to stuff I like to read as well, and deliberately not add any dum nofollow or other stupid CEO. My wesite, not Googles :-]

Edit 2:

Could we have a tread were everyone who wants posts their imperfect personal web sites? Or has there been one and I have missed it?

You're actually touching on the reason why SEO is an anti-pattern for society. Search engines (ideally) eventually find the best source of information for a query. SEO artificially skews these results.

Agree, which is why I think we (random people with technical skills who like to hang around the web) could do something good and useful just by creating genuine websites for no other reason than the art, fun and knowledge sharing.

If we all did we could soon have something really awesome going on.

If there ever was a good time to do this again it seems to be now.

> No further SEO necessary. (I don’t know if this would work anymore.)

This still works. I wrote about a topic awhile back o help me understand it and when I search for the topic, my post still appears in the search results.

I didn’t write it to get to the top of any search result but for myself so I could understand it. Now when I see the post there, I’m glad that I’m not the only one who benefitted. As other people have pointed out:

Write. Put it out there. Do it for yourself first and not to be popular. If it helps you, it might help someone else. And who knows, someone else might even point out something you didn’t know before.

You should consider using a trivet to keep your chicken off the bottom of the dutch oven/where the temperatures are more consistent.

Thank you for the trivet recommendation. In addition to purchasing the 5L ditch oven and thermometers after reading the recipe blog post I've now purchased a trivet to go along with it.

Yep.

I took a deep dive at one point into understanding concurrent transaction behavior in MySQL and its ramifications. Probably go back and reference that post about once a month...

I was kind of thinking along the same lines as the OP until I read your comment, in particular "It’s about being able to share ones ideas and document your interests". I really like the idea (and it seems obvious to me now) that you could use a personal website as a documentation hub for various things that come up and that could be useful to others. Ha! The original point of the internet. I might have to set up a site now.

Hmm... let's call it a Personal Open Document (POD) or something like that.

Have you considered crowdfunding further development of your recipe, like the infamous potato salad Kickstarter?

Thank you for sharing the fried chicken recipe. I've ordered the oven and thermometers and will be attempting it this Friday night.

This is a well-written comment from an interesting point of view. That's all you need to write a blog article. If there are things you'd rather be doing than writing a blog, do them instead, but a blog doesn't have to be an exercise in personal branding. It can just be a place where you publish your thoughts and the things you've learned.

This is a well-written comment from an interesting point of view. That's all you need to write a blog article.

Writing HN comments is much easier than writing blog posts because the inspiration is the story that's been linked to; for a blog post you don't have that starting point, you just have a blank page. That's a heck of a barrier for most people when they're starting out.

I've considered rolling comments I've made here into blog posts. I'm not sure if that's a fox paws[0], though.

[0] I know. I did it on purpose.

Jokes are like code. If you have to explain then it's probably not very good. ;)

I take great joy in awful jokes and puns. For some reason they make me very happy.

If it's insightful/interesting - why not?

It's incredibly hard to search HN comments via search engines too, but I've definitely come across comments that just made me stop and think.

For what it’s worth, I think this comment would make a great single page personal website.

I don't think writing is just about communicating things to other people. It's also communicating things to yourself.

I think the greatest value in writing things down is to order and articulate your own thoughts. Certainly in my own case, I never finish a large chunk of articles I start to write simply because during the research I find out I was wrong, or that things are more complex than I thought and I'm no longer sure I'm right.

See my personal website for a post I wrote about that :-) https://arp242.net/weblog/why-write.html

An additional reason is that publishing your thoughts also means people can point out flaws or points you hadn't considered. Maintaining a website is just one way of doing that of course (commenting here is another), but I find it's a pretty effective way.

> It's also communicating things to yourself.

Yeah! And remember to back it up. I had a blog in the early days when it was all new, and bitterly regret not backing it up properly - 5 years of content gone.

I handle my websites in a way that provide automatic backups -- I keep complete mirrors on my own machines that are already part of a backup regime. I make changes to the mirrors, and then upload the changes from there to the public sites.

That way, I always have an offline copy without having to remember to make one specifically.

Have you checked archive.org for a backup? It's saved me a few times.

No, I wrote the blog software myself and all the content was stored in a MySQL database on my rented host. I thought I'd backed it up, but hadn't. It's the usual story of "it isn't a backup until you've tested it".

This fits my experience as well. It’s always interesting to see what assumptions or unspecific placeholders I made that are fleshed out when actually writing.

To pick a bit, your *Breaking Bad" reference occurs well into the series, not at the start. It opens with his diagnosis, which sets everything else in motion.

It's one of the first episodes, like the third or something? In the context of 62 episodes in total, I would consider that to be "at the start".

That said, it's needless verbiage, and removing "at the start" made the paragraph better.

> and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

That, or you might feel pressurized into finding some interesting hobbies or pastimes. The horror!

I used to feel the same way as you, but then I decided I didn't care if I was interesting or not (I'm not). So I made myself a website. I only update it a handful of times a year when I have something that I'm excited enough to write about. I choose a dead simple design that would be timeless and never need updating.[0]

Turns out a few things I've written about have actually been very helpful and useful to a handful of other people in the world, and they even emailed me to thank me for sharing it! That was pleasant. I'm not looking to be famous or popular, but it felt good knowing that something I had done helped a few other people out.

[0] My styles are based on this: https://github.com/programble/writ

It's basically Web 1.0 but made to look nice and read well on large screens.

I'm a UX designer in my professional life but the last thing I wanted was a slick, trendy, bloated site. My site is completely static and loads blazingly fast. The CSS is simple too so it should play nice with user-agent styles too.

> I'm a UX designer in my professional life but ... My site is completely static and loads blazingly fast.

Isn't that good UX design? Or are fast-loading sites a taboo in the UX field?

> Isn't that good UX design?

It certainly is!

> Or are fast-loading sites a taboo in the UX field?

Tragically overlooked.

I may not know who you are, but after reading this post I know that I would definitely never want to hire you. So there's that.

Please don't be rude and mean.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You should make a personal website, and just copy-paste this post onto it. Would be a bold statement!

To be fair, this comment would make a pretty good blog post

> Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk your ear off about the places I've been and the things I've done, but if I'm objective about it, none of it is particularly praiseworthy, and it's hardly going to make me stand out to a potential employer. Any attempt to dramatize my life or skills is going to reek of pomposity, even the rare bits that are somewhat unique.

https://fs.blog/2012/07/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-peo...

Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

You should take this comment and use it as your personal web page. It shows how grounded you are and how much you know yourself and can recognize your own limitations. It’s a breath of fresh air where there does seem to be a lot of pomp and over selling.

> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

I think it's a good idea to have a personal web site. If someone wants to find out more about you, they have a chance of hearing your side of the story: what's interesting to you, what you've shared with the world, and so on. If you only post on Facebook, Twitter, etc., then when those sites disappear or change their terms of service your information doesn't disappear. Do you want those companies in complete control of what others learn about you, or do you want to have some control? There are many former powerhouses of social interaction that have since disappeared, including MySpace, AOL, Google+. But if you own your own web site, you decide if it will remain available, not someone else, and what it will say.

You don't need to be "interesting". Everyone is probably interesting to someone anyway, and I think that's the wrong thing to strive for. Instead, think of things that you could share that might be useful to someone else, and share them. If you've helped someone else, then you've provided value to the world, and that's all anyone can ask for.

There's no requirement that you keep everything "up to date". Put a date on what you release, modify it if you update, and that's that. If it was released 20 years ago, it'll make the time clear. And really old stuff can still be really useful.

I just Googled myself, and my home page returns the top rank to me. Sure, it might not to others, but clearly it's possible to be easily findable even with a somewhat common name.

Regarding "enough interesting content"... you don't need to have a lot of interesting content. Post at least one thing that you believe helps at least one other person. Now your site has value to someone else. To me, that's enough.

These are all great arguments but they're also contingent on Google. If google doesn't show your website to people when they search for you, then they won't find it.

> go out of date

Pause for a moment on this one. Why would it go out of date?

The oldest content currently listed on the front page of my website is from 2005. What is in it has not gone out of date in the slightest. In fact, nothing from the intervening fourteen years has gone out of date. I could probably dig back through archive.org and pick out some more from sites I had back in the 1990's that would still be perfectly good, up to date content today.

If what you're writing is substantive, not gossip, there is no reason to think about it going out of date. Just don't wrap it in a blog format where the structure of the site makes it look like it's going out of date.

Maybe they mean things like commands to install software, command line arguments, dead URLs. Things like that change.

I have an exceedingly common first and last name

As you implied, that's kind of like a secret weapon. No bored middle manager can Google you and not hire you because they didn't like the wording of a DIY forum post about your plumbing 9 years ago.

I agree! My real name is exceedingly common as well, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It makes me essentially ungoogle-able.

I keep my own simple static web site in order to host my resume. It is by far the most important page, and, at times, the most visited.

> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

There was a writer (sorry, forgot who), that used to say: it's not that your life is not interesting, it's that you don't have a good storyteller to tell it.

Good storytellers can spin up a great story out of seemingly very boring facts. It's just the way you tell it.

Most youtubers/streamers/influencers are not really saying anything particularly cool or interesting, but they know how to tell it to their audience.

It's very similar to marketing/product. You need a decent product to sell, but most of the success will come from being able to properly market it, not from how good the product is.

In this case, you and your experiences are the product, the stories about them and how to tell them are the marketing.

You can definitely learn how to tell better stories.

One last analogy, you know when someone tells a joke and it's just not funny at all? Then your hear someone else tell exactly the same joke, but now it's actually really funny? The difference is not the joke, but they way they tell it.

I'm going to opine that you probably are a lot more interesting than might think.

Granted that most people's lives don't serialise down well into a regular stream of weekly episodes. If one can put aside the requirement to "be someone" on the internet, I think maintaining a personal site can be a really great form of self expression, albeit with a few provisos.

Decades ago I never really understood how to use VI editor or how ATM AAL5 worked or how SSH authorized keys worked until I wrote it down and tried to teach a coworker. Ditto Kerberos, SSL, AFS, LDAP, BGP route priority list, DNS glue records, lisp lambda functions ...

For topics I'm an expert at, or at least an old timer, I'm well aware I'm worse at teaching those topics than someone who more recently learned and I wouldn't even bother trying to document or teach that stuff.

Find your edge, push a bit beyond it, chmod a+r your notebook, more or less.

I have run joelx.com for 12 years now and have thousands of posts. As social media sites have come and gone, this site has remained. I sometimes will copy and paste a social media post onto my site or vice versa. I think when you have all your ideas and memories in one place, it becomes very powerful. I like to take a trip down memory lane once in a while and see what I was thinking or working on a decade ago.

I came here unknowingly to hear this. I am you. Thank you for this.

Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author.

I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I’ve learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.

I know it’s not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it’ll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.

If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.

Agreed. I'm a bit jealous of his (Mostly) food truck name ideas, https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/.

Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry.

And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.

I don't know if a Coleslaw food truck service scales.

That is an impressive list

>25. Buenos Nachos

Hmm, where have I possibley seen this before? :)

Agreed, that list of food truck names is punny.

He forgot the best two:

Gyros and Villains

Spaghett-about-it

I had an idea for a Vietnamese Italian fusion joint called Pho gettaboutit. Rice noodles, rare beef, and tripe with Bolognese sauce and garlic bread? Mmmmmm.

A+ name ideas.

How about: Beauty and the yeast The walking bread

The best one we've come up with is a Russian-American fusion truck named "Collusion", serving (alcohol-free) cocktails named after all the major players / plot points in the "Russia investigation".

It's an endless source of entertaining ideas. "Moscow Mueller", "Manafort on the Rocks", "Cohen Kvass". Or you can go for drinks that are flavored after their namesakes: dry, sweet, bitter, sour.

Park it in front of Trump Tower on central park, and Instagram fame would be instantaneous! Feel free to steal my idea.

Or "Otto's Collusion Repair"

I have a similar concept: collections of fake band names, domain names, stand-up comedy pieces, and rap-suitable lyrics. The trick is extracting coherent routines that tell a story well.

Ages ago, in the age of Usenet, I had a huge collection of such bits (plus quotes of others) for use in .signature files.

Another variation on this is the opening titles to "Bob's Burgers".

A series of disasters hits the restaurant before its ultimately opening (fire, pests, etc) and the respondents (exterminator,etc.) has a new, funny name each time. Also, the neighboring stores' names vary in funny ways.

> If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a search engine tailored to this sort of thing? As in search all the blogs for human knowledge and experience.

I would use this.

This has been stuck in my mind for a while. The past months, whenever I searched for something I would get covered in pages upon pages of SEO-friendly copywriter bullshit without real content; it's driving me mad.

How possible would it be, to build something like this?

You could start a search engine with data from commoncrawl, maybe you can even get other projects like archive.is to ship you some hard drives. Then you just need to build an index and serve search queries; plenty of open source search engines have been attempted, giving good Templates or even directly usable implementations.

The hard thing is distinguishing personal blogs from blogspam and other worthless content. Performance is a huge issue since you want to spend at most double digit milliseconds per page, but maybe it's getting viable with ML becoming commoditized. But getting this perfect would make or break the project.

I am also thinking about this problem constantly. SEO destroyed internet for me. I keep searching on HN using https://hn.algolia.com but obviously you can use it only for specific topics. I think there is a market in this problem

That engine will be equally spammed by SEO posters. Look how hard google is trying and still failing.

Perhaps we will end up back with hand curated directories.

If you're passionate about a subject, you're going to have strong opinions about said subject. If you voice/publish those opinions, some people are going to hate you. Perhaps a potential employer was set to hire you until they read your blog post in which you were eloquently critical about offshoring, for example.

Or worse, you expressed an off-hand opinion about some social issue back in 2006 in an otherwise technical blog post that the wrong person stumbled upon and now the world is going to cave in on you.

I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.

I would suggest doing under a generic domain.

You want to maintain a certain image for employers and that restricts your freedom to rant.

There's that.

I don't point potential employers to my personal website (which I also don't associate with my real name). It's just none of their business. When I want to share work that I've done, I put it into a standalone presentation that I provide on a memory stick.

> I would love to write more, but censoring myself for the sake of future employers, psychos, etc. tends to make anything I do produce come off as bland and uninteresting.

Just write about your favorite hobby. When I started my personal blog a decade ago (yikes...), I chose a topic and made a rule that I would stick to it. No politics, no tech, no personal drama. I still enjoy writing about it, and have almost always stuck to the rule, so I don't think an employer could take offense at any of the several hundred thousand words I wrote.

I understand your concern, but I think you can avoid a lot of the negative sides by only writing about things you like. It’s really hard to piss people off if you’re sharing experiences about things you love, especially if you stick to just your experiences and never try to tell people what the “right” way to do things is.

Political views have never been much of a problem for me. I’m strongly opinionated, but I also work in the public sector, which means I leave my personal political views completely out of my professional life. That is certainly a form of self-censorship, but even though it it’s forced upon public servants, I can’t think of a single time I regret keeping my political opinions to myself. There are certainly political movements I wouldn’t work for, but over all it rarely seem like a good idea to get into politics unless you actually want to make a career out of it.

Journalling is extremely fulfilling to me and writing about things that bother me quiets my mind.

The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website.

I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or there's one or two decidedly well known person(s) of that name, and that person has authored a personal site, search engines should prioritize that on the first page, if not the very first result(s).

Try googling for John Carmack, Barack Obama, or (op) Mark Christian. What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?

Not true. I can give the counter point. When you Google the name of my better half you get a "fact card" with reference to her website. The first "regular" search result is again her website. The second result is her Facebook page.

As the algorithm is hidden it is hard to say why. But should I guess then I think embedded microdata is an important weight (https://schema.org).

For the record: She has no Wikipedia page (as most notable people would have) which typically rank very high.

You don't need the SEO for your name in particular. Here is why:

1. People who know you have your url.

2. People you meet have a business card or SMS from you with the URL

3. People searching for you can find you on social media, but most social media allows you to link to the site.

4. People searching for the keywords you use in your posts will find you if they are unique enough.

Even people with the url will usually just search, not use the url. Even less so if it's on a business card (even if it's a QR code).

I'll usually try these kinds of searches if it's someone with a common name:

  John Doe <profession>
  John Doe <name of city>
  John Doe <name of employer>

Is that not common?

My full name is very common. I share it with an actor, a photographer, two designers, and one basketball player. Three of us have personal websites and one of us has a Wikipedia page.

I've adopted the alias "r3bl" to counter that, so that there's something easy to remember and somewhat unique that others could type into a search engine. ".com" was of course squatted, but as far as I could tell, it was pretty unique (with one "e" emitted and one "e" replaced with a 3 like a True Hacker). Now I share that alias with two esports teams and one Silicon Valley company that could afford to buy ".com" from the squatter. I appear anywhere from #1 result to not on the first page at all, depending on your location.

I hope I share a name with someone who's online presence will become valuable, so I can sell them my {my.name}.com domain!

> What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?

Is this really an issue?

Someone looking for you personally either for professional or personal reasons already knows who you are so probably already has the relevant URL: from your CV or application form/letter, on a business card, from an email footer, because you've posted links on social media where they are linked to or otherwise follow you, from your profiles on online forums, by deriving it from your email address, ...

Someone looking for the sort of content you are publishing (if it isn't personal journal/diary/blog/etc. style content) will be searching for terms relevant to that and not your name, or those terms plus your name if you are well known in the field. Any SEO should be targetted at that content, not your name.

Before asking "how would someone find me by searching for my name?", first consider "why would anyone feel the need to find me by searching for my name?". It is most likely not a problem you actually need to solve.

> your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project, ... ... will rank first and ahead of any personal website

Because those things are most likely what people are actually looking for. Remember: search engines are focused on giving the searchers what they want, not sending them to where you want them to go.

Where you have control of the content (you might on a project page, you will on your social media accounts), solve that problem by having links to your personal page in a prominent place. If someone doesn't click the extra time then they really weren't wanting to find you hard enough!

I would like to find peoples personal websites by searching for their names. I shouldn't have to go through LinkedIn for that. If there was a search engine that favored non-social media sites or was tweakable to find less trafficked, smaller domains, I would use it extensively. Google results are too often sabotaged.

> I shouldn't have to go through LinkedIn for that.

Then don't. It's not that difficult to recognize a result from LinkedShit or any other 'social' 'media' site, ignore that result, and move your attention to the next one in the list.

I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link.

It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.

I have a ten year old personal website that does not appear to be indexed by google at all anymore. There was an article about this that made the front page, that some old websites are being dropped from the index. If you search my name from duck duck go its the first hit.

Your website is indexed by Google. You can see whether it's indexed by running a site specific search. Put "site:" before the domain name. But that site has three pages, one of which is a blog listing with no content. It's not ranked because there's nothing worth ranking.

If you are searching for information about me, it is the best source online. Ideally the best sources are listed first. DDG does that, and Google doesn't list it even in the first half-dozen pages. Is it really a worse website than all the spam white-page sites?

Google is really terrible for searches like that.

For the longest time searching for "Steve", in the UK, brought my website as the first result.

These days with "personalised" search results it is harder to tell, but my own searches for my full-name bring me first. Even though I share that name with a few other people.

(I wish I'd bought steve.com, there was a time when I was tempted but after a year or two it was too late. I ended up having https://steve.org.uk, then later https://steve.fi after I moved to Finland.)

Me too. I have a simple static site/blog with mostly textual content going back to around 1999 and I'm lucky to have a reasonably unique firstname/lastname combo (ish); my blog currently is top on Google and Bing.

> It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.

Disagree. My first personal web page from 1996 is still online and I have a very rare (perhaps unique) name. Until a few years ago, all my personal pages (including FB, Twitter) were ranked high by search engines, but since then they've been dethroned by references to former companies, press coverage, websites that list people affiliated with corporations and other such things.

My conclusion from this is that personal pages have somehow been ranked lower recently and news sites and popular websites will be ranked higher if they mention your name (even if the mention is not prominent and years old). This means that nowadays it would probably be useful to put a personal homepage on a popular site like about.me.

I was going to say that you can combat this by simply linking to your website from all these profiles but it turns out that virtually all social media sites `rel="nofollow"` homepage links. Which in itself is a pretty sleazy tactic (sure, the official reason is to combat spam).

Before they did that there was tremendous abuse by spammers. I'm sure the reason they haven't come up with a good workaround for regular ppl is more in line with their general sleazyness

> Try googling for John Carmack,

And what should the top match for John Carmack be, in your opinion? Where is his homepage?

FWIW on Bing I got his Wikipedia article first and his twitter accoount second, which seems like sensible results in his case.

> The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website.

I have my site linked on pretty much all those social sites, and it ranks first.

Have a globally unique name, not to mention a first.last domain probably doesn’t hurt either.

My (not uncommon) name used to have my site in the top 3, then I was pushed to page 5-6 by the opening of a Night Market in Bangkok, I guess there are worse ways to go.

My names not super common yet not uncommon. My personal website is the top couple results googling my own name. I think it just takes time and diligence. Actually writing things that get people to link to you.

I find it interesting how if I Google my name, the results are Facebook (search results for <my name>), Facebook (profile of someone else with my name), my LinkedIn, my website, and then a bunch of shady background check and voter info websites. It used to be that my GitLab was result 4 on page 1 and my website was on page 2, now they've switched places. I haven't done any SEO (or if I have, it was not intentional).

That works for me. I'm not famous enough to merit a Wikipedia page, and I don't really care if I'm on the first page of a search for my name. (Some other person with the same name does.) Most of the traffic to my personal site comes from searches, but those people are searching for what I write about, not who I am.

This bugs me too. The best I can do is make sure that all of my profiles on my social media sites prominently link back to my personal site.

For me, it's LinkedIn, my work's website, then my personal site. But there's nobody else in the world with my name, so that helps. If your name is common you'd have to put in significant work, I imagine. If you share a name with someone noteworthy, you're probably sol.

In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.

How is this law enforced? It seems like you could google them and discard their application for other reasons.

Even bigger question: how is it tracked what application was discarded and why?

Sounds like a well-intentioned eurocratic nightmare.

This also holds for eg. age and sex discrimination - find out who they are, reject them for something else. Not being able to easily enforce a law doesn't mean one should break it.

Sounds like another lip-service law that European countries like to enact and then rely on the honor system for enforcement.

I have the opposite problem, I share the name with someone else working in the tech field who is academically and professionally my senior.

I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford

Did you ever try to bullshit your way into one of these positions? Obviously it's a bad idea, but I'm only half joking since it might be an interesting experiment to see how people rate and value you if their mind may have already been made up.

Why is that a bad idea? If you can pass the interview stages and the only difference is perception then I say go for it.

Stealing someone identity is, by definition, a bad idea.

> is, by definition, a bad idea.

So what is the definition?

This is certainly legal.

"So tell me about your time lecturing at Stanford"

"Well you see uhh thats not me but uhh..."

"I think we are done here."

And you've just burned a massive bridge.

Haha I think theyd clock I wasnt the guy they thought I was when a tattood kid in his 20s walked in the door

On a similar note, there was a TV series about faking it. (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/faking-it/episode-guide)

I taken a few phone interviews without realizing that they had the wrong guy.

It's never turned into an awkward situation just yet but its also never gotten further than that.

I have a more minor issue, in that my mum once mistook a SciFi/horror film director for me, because of his website. I also share a name with a Victorian era author. As I’m now writing a novel, I’m going to have to publish with a pen name.

Perfect opportunity to add a mysterious initial. Ben Ÿ. W...

If I do that, I’m adding non-latin characters. B. 狐. Я. W.

(I don’t except a publisher would let me do that).

People accuse me of playing Baseball, Football, and Guitar for the band TOOL.

You're undervaluing yourself.

I'm 26

Doesn't matter, it's not an army.

I'd be curious to know how well that's enforced. There's an ocean full of HR tech startups that are doing just that programmatically, to produce scores on all sorts of things to rate candidates.

Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence.

If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.

Not disagreeing at all. Just spelling out the unfortunate direction that hiring tools are heading towards.

> violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence

No they shouldn't. What they should do though is geoblock all access coming to their sites and services which they can identify as coming from EU origin, plus add to their site EULA that anyone under EU jurisdiction is not authorized to use their site under any circumstances and such access will be considered unauthorized access, which is a criminal act.

> If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them

That's two of the most likely sources of lies. Neither has much value.

The article said that the applicant googled the interviewer, though.

Yes, right after posting I realized I wasn't directly on the topic. I hope it brings some value to discussion anyway.

For what it's worth, I was initially confused as well. It's convolutedly phrased.

I started a personal website because the other person with my name was a cannabis legalisation advocate.

This was the early 2000s, and I was easily able to knock him from the top spot on the major search engines.

Drugs are bad mkaaaay

The only page where my full name appears in on my LinkedIn page; I tried searching for it, both on bing and duckduckgo my LinkedIn page was on the second page of results, with a handfull of LinkedIn profiles I've never seen and which are not linked to my profile beforehand. Google got it as the first result, though.

I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that...

Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster.

For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`. (The longer story behind this is that, early in dotcoms, I very quickly got tired of being at social parties of grad students, with MBA students always wanting to talk to me for startup reasons. Also, CS departments and culture were changing due to the gold rush. Going "non-profit" was an idealistic youth reaction.)

The reasons I keep the vanity domain and hosting include:

(1) I'm not signing over rights to some snooping companies to snoop on my email, nor will I implicitly endorse that practice. (IMHO, the current practice of corporate snooping on everyone's private communications is a bad for society. All this time, we techies have been shirking our responsibility to advise people about what they're signing away, and why that's an undesirable direction. I haven't done my part, but I'll try not to make it worse.)

(2) The vanity domain name gives me flexibility for where&how I host, and doesn't lock me into anyone. (Though I'll remain loyal to a hoster who's worked well, even if that means my site is not a showcase for a currently popular service. I've done novel things on AWS professionally, and I shouldn't have to prove anything with my quaint little personal site.)

(3) I've run the canonical Web pages for various niche open source projects, and there's never been an obviously good third-party permanent home for them. (I did almost move those projects to a `git`-centric third-party service, fairly recently, but then my first choice service was acquired by a very different corporate culture, and this also raised the question of how my second choice is going to change (due to competition, or presumably being courted for acquisition). Moving is a lot of trouble to go to, for a situation that might make me want to move again soon after that, so I stick with my ancient site design and hoster.)

I have mixed feelings about the Web site's dated visual design, and I think this is a consideration for anyone who makes a Web presence that will last for years... Mine has looked almost identical for ages, and now feels personally "genuine" to me, compared to better but generic modern looks. While the look stayed the same, the implementation has moved from `table`, to CSS that mimiced the `table` look, to CSS that's responsive while still respecting user's preferred font size. In parallel, there was also a move from HTML4-ish, to XHTML, to HTML5. Along the way, I dropped some unnecessary features that were flashy when I did them, like code syntax coloring (for which I rigged up Emacs into site generation).

I suppose a dated-looking site filters out job opportunities from people who insist that one's personal Web site showcase their best frontend practices. It could stand another look, at tweaks or makeover or complete rethinking, but I'd rather invest unpaid time in contributing to an open source project or techie community, than futzing around with the vanity domain.

You might keep updating your own site, but at some point you might have better things to do, so try to leave it in a style you won't mind being frozen at for years.

> I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that... > > Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster.

Much the same sort-of chronology and hosting story for me…

> For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`.

I'm curious to pick your brains on that. I've gone the other way: I ended up standardising on a .net but I kinda wish I had the .org instead, my rationale is, .org is a closer match to what my site is: if I squint I can consider it to be an "organisation" of one, but I can't convince myself that it or I'm a network. I originally picked the .net because I thought it scanned better with my choice of domain.

I don't think I have any strong feelings on TLDs today. Especially when there's so many new TLDs, appropriations of the county code TLDs, and so many non-techies. I'm guessing many techies no longer know what the original TLDs meant, back before rules/conventions were relaxed, pre-ICANN. Either .net or .org original meanings, "of one", could work.

As an aside, I'm still slightly uncomfortable with the real-name domain name. I did it because I had some idea that this was a facet/presence of my real identity, which already had a name, and there's the idea of standing behind one's name. The discomfort is because my upbringing tried to teach me a flavor of traditional values, like not being boastful, not advertising your deeds, etc., yet the real-name domain name means I'm plastering my name all over, like some politician. Maybe why I went with it despite discomfort is that I'd gotten used to discomfort -- trying to reconcile upbringing (humble is good), with personality (still learning), with conventions in industry&academia (promoting name is accepted/required). I don't worry about it, and I do need some kind of identifier in this space, but I don't know whether I'll ever fully like the domain name.

> For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`.

Why not use .us (if you are in the USA, that is)?

I'm very much a US American, and shaped by it. But, as a fellow human, talking with people around the world on the Internet, tacking `.us` onto my name might feel like I'm asserting traditional borders between people, when my intent is more warm-fuzzy worldwide fellowship.

I wish I had bought a vanity domain sooner, mostly for the web hosting flexibility, but also for the email (despite the pain of getting past Gmail's spam filter). It's mostly stock Wordpress, but it gets the job done, while only looking slightly dated.

I went with ".com," not because it was a commercial site (it isn't), but because most people assume that all URLs end in ".com," so ".net" or ".org" would have been confusing. I can tell someone I'm at $DOMAIN and not have to specify the TLD.

> For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`.

I have all three (but my personal domain is not my name). I use them each for different purposes. The .com is my public-facing, general purpose website. The .org is a site I use to provide tools and coordination with my friends (sortof like a private social media thing). The .net I use for servers that are intended just for me (sortof like a gateway to a private cloud).

I would consider being an online ghost as a great compliment with how everything has been lately. There is way too much public information being pumped out for no reason at all.

This was my sentiment while reading the article. Two years ago I went through a process of completely stripping away my online presence. I'm now unsearchable by name, name and company, name and home town.

The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

> I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.

How did you achieve that and what about sites like archive.org?

Also, have you considered going a "middle path" where you are searchable but no info comes up besides your name and face? With how things seem to be evolving I lean torwards a "grey man" strategy because some day you will be suspicious by not being searchable online. At least that's what I kinda fear.

I'm lucky that I share a first and last name with someone who is a successful Social Media influencer, also with a professional photographer, a journalist and and an amateur model (Haha, I wonder if that is enough for an Internet detective to work out my name!). This helps because they all have very searchable content online.

I've tried to strike a balance between anonymity and retaining 'placeholder' accounts with my name. I can't rule out a change of heart in the future.

I removed all data from facebook manually by using Social Book Posts Manager. Clunky but it works. It took about a week of different sessions to allow it to work through all of my facebook content. My FB account still exists but is effectively private, all the settings are as locked down as I can make them.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

I deleted all my tweets manually and set my account to private where possible.

I stripped my LinkedIn profile back to basics manually because I didn't really use it anyway. I don't need it, I have a job I'm happy with that pays the mortgage, I don't feel the need to network myself.

I removed the content from my website (<firstname><lastname>.co.uk). I left it displaying my domain registrar's holding page because I figured Google would down-rate that. It appears to have worked because it never appears in search results for either or both of my names.

My domain is a .co.uk so I've taken advantage of Nominet's anonymity service and no details are visible via public WHOIS.

I haven't asked Archive.org to remove the archived versions of my site, if someone knows about it, they could look there. At present I don't actually have any publicly accessible storage to place the robots.txt so I keep procrastinating about it.

I submitted a removal request to 192.com which is a site that publishes UK telephone directory data. They honour removal requests.

I occasionally google myself (especially from new devices and new locations/IP addresses to see if Google is presenting different results for different searchers) to check.

Be careful. You might leave a trace of yourself by searching for yourself on new, and perhaps even non-trusted devices.

Streisand effect came to mind, too.

You've changed the subject slightly, away from searchability and online presence/self promotion, to tracking by Big Brother.

I concede that Google track me everywhere, I can't stop it so I live with it. I aim for a managed level of visibility.

I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin to reduce some of my digital footprint.

You can throw Google in a container but it comes with its own annoyances.

Thank you for your extensive reply!

I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines. I have several name-doppelgängers out there that do ample SEO for themselves. Plus we have the rapper now. I have close to zero presence on social media. You would be hard pressed to find a single photo of me by doing basic name and location searches. Really didn’t have to do any scrubbing or “reputation management.” I consider it a real, rare blessing in this world where online privacy is disappearing.

I have no doubt a highly motivated and technical individual (or nation state adversary) could find and dox me, but the average curious HR person or run-of-the-mill stalker will likely not have much luck.

Same here. It also makes it harder to find you in gigantic password db dumps.

It's an interesting consideration in naming a child.

>I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines.

Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.

I too stripped away my online presence a few years ago. I even went ahead further and deleted all my accounts I don't use, aren't privacy-oriented, etc. I now have a spreadsheet of the very few accounts I have for specific products and services. To that extent, I rarely sign up for anything new these days and or use a lot of applications and services.

I also say nay to having an online presence. I prefer silent, out-of-sight, deep work. On the other hand, I do support having a blog to journal and or log about anything you'd like, public or private. If public, I suggest to not use your real name, etc, but an unusual name like a 8-bit binary number.

Not having an online presence is free-ing. Having an online presence feels like you're a brand and are subjugated to update. Cal Newport might have talked about something along these above things in his latest book, "Digital Minimalism".

As someone who's full name is unique on earth, this is nearly impossible for me.

If I was an online ghost I would never get hired. In my line of work you need a CV with publications. While you become a public figure in the process of publishing papers, its actually proof of work vs. trying to talk about your proprietary little thing you worked on at company X that you aren't really allowed to go into specifics about, or doing an interview exam on one tangential problem you may or may not ever encounter in the job like you are in undergrad again. If the recruiter wants to see what I can do, they can just read what I wrote, and ask me for clarification rather than total explanation.

Another massive benefit of being a public face is that collaboration is now possible. Two people in the same Uber pool ride in SV could be struggling with the exact same issue and have no idea that the other person exists because the CS field is closed off and proprietary for the sake of shareholder profit. Think of all the investment and engineering by a half a dozen companies towards the same exact goal of a self driving car. Imagine if all those NDAs were ripped up, and every engineer met up at a conference, gave talks, held poster sessions, troubleshooted common problems, set up meetings, emails, collaborations, joint efforts, shared resources and data, etc.

But then, of course, no company will be able to 'win' and dominate market share and print money for the shareholders.

Except that makes it super easy for anyone to fill that void. Someone who you've pissed off could write some trash about you and it would become the #1 result on google.

A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?"

The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content that you put up. Nowadays, if you're unlucky and you have a name that's somewhat common, or even just a single other person exists with a strong online footprint that has the same name as you, then you won't even rank for your own name any more. If you want any of your actual content to rank, then the chances of making that happen are even slimmer.

More eyeballs on the internet means greater incentives to put content online that will get noticed, which means that commercial interests will throw money and resources at making that happen which a personal side project can't compete with. More content online means search engines get to be pickier about what they show to users. The cost/benefit calculation has changed dramatically, especially around how much content you have to put up and how frequently you have to put up content, because search engines heavily penalize content for being old or stale even when content ages well when it's good and even when you actually write on stuff that you are a real authority on and even when the web is desperately in need of less of the "sponsored" kind of content and more of the "independent & authoritative" kind of content.

So in order to truly solve the problem of making it worthwhile again for people to have personal websites, one first needs to solve the discovery problem.

I think somebody should invent a search engine to do that.

I think that when people put up personal webpages now, they should adopt a "fediverse" technology stack to turn their personal webpages into a social-media-like experience that allows for an alternative vector of discovery next to keyword search.

I think that policymakers should reverse the current trend wherein they put liabilities on website owners & operators that a private person doing a personal webpage can't possibly shoulder.

So, in conclusion: Bring back some of the goodness of the WWW of 1997 again. I'm all for it. But the technology community has a loooong way to go, before that can become a reality.

You make it sound like a big audience is the only thing that matters. The linked post talks about a personal website as a digital identity. Giving people a link so they can find you online is a good reason to have a website, even today.

Besides that, making your own website is rewarding in many other ways - Being creative, getting thoughts out of your head, pinning down certain arguments you tend to repeat, etc.

The first aspect you mention (handing out a link so people can look it up) is like an online business card that's "free form" in nature. That makes sense if you are a creative professional and the website is a showcase of your creative ability.

But otherwise: If you apply for an job, say in finance, you'll be asked for a resume, because people can't be bothered dealing with information that's extraneous to what goes into a resume.

If you apply for a job as a coder, you'll be asked for a link to a github repo, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your code.

If you apply for a research role, you'll be asked for a link to where your publications can be found, maybe on researchgate, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your peer-reviewed publications.

Do you see the pattern here? It's another example of the balance between information and attention shifting towards too-much-information/too-little-attention. -- And personal webpages aren't good at dealing with the too-little-attention part of the equation, so there is rarely a demand for giving people information about yourself in the "free form" style.

The second aspect you mention: If you produce some webpage content, you can always decide whether you want to see it as a diary and not put it up online, or whether you want to see it as something that should be out in the public, and do put it up online. It seems to me like a contradiction to prefer putting it online, but then not to care about whether it actually gets seen or not. (Especially considering that one gets into a lot of liability everytime one puts something up online).

> If you apply for a job as a coder, you'll be asked for a link to a github repo, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your code.

In my experience, this is not true. I setup a website to describe software projects, and my role in them. It was, per my current boss, a key factor in getting an interview. Browsing github repo's, imo, is much more bothersome than reading a well crafted project page.

> Giving people a link so they can find you online…

…does not always work. When I give people a link they can't click on, they type it in the search bar. And not even in full, they tend to strip the http://www and .com ends. And you can't click on a piece of paper, which is where my CV typically ends up on.

Last week, I interviewed with someone who said he googled me. All he found was a "little GitHub page". My full name ranks my personal web site first or second on every search engine I've tried, yet he couldn't find it. Is the Google bubble that strong?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Loup+Vaillant

https://www.google.com/search?q=Loup%20Vaillant

https://www.bing.com/search?q=Loup+Vaillant

Your personal website come second for me. I wonder whether the person just looked at the first result.

> When I give people a link they can't click on […]

Try giving them a QR code instead.

"Weird, I couldn't add you on snapchat with your code"

Your personal website, btw, is really great, and that interviewer missed out. I program mostly Python in scientific contexts, but it's great to have your perspective on some larger questions of programming style and technology.

Thanks. :-)

When I searched for your name, it came up second in Google, first in DuckDuckGo and first in Bing. Not sure how the interviewer managed to miss it, both the site and your GitHub profile are in the top two results for your name.

I'd like to point out that all said is not true for small languages. I got a website in Hebrew, and due to the lack of competition I'm #1 on my name, and #1 in many keywords.

I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.

I think that was the core of the "old" 97 websites - I mean Google didn't exist back then, so finding a page when you search for a name was neither here nor there. Instead you found a webpage through word of mouth, and unlike today, you'd sit down and spend the time to have a good browse through the site.

On that last note, personal websites are often still manageable - that is, if you sit down for a couple hours, you can consume a lot of the content that one person created in the span of an X amount of years. Not so much with a lot of the bigger websites nowadays; Medium.com is a rabbithole and you'll quickly end up going to another author's posts. News and moreso social media sites are an infinite torrent of rapid fire blurbs, all tugging you one way then the other in terms of subjects, political sides, and in ways to try and sell something to you.

My own recollection of the pre-Google era of Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc was that search engines already accounted for the lion's share of content discovery online. My gut feeling would be that it might have been even larger back then than it is now, considering the role that social media play nowadays.

What it was like before then I can't say as I'm not that old, but I imagine that URLs would have been made known through the usenet, irc and so on, which were also more multicast/broadcast in nature than word-of-mouth in the sense of people who actually personally know each other in meatspace communicating point-to-point.

web-rings

> I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.

It depends on what your expectations/goals are. I don't have any expectations to find regular readers or to have XXX monthly users. However, I have the expectation that people will find my blog post if they're looking for a problem which I have solved. I also have the expectation that I can link to my blog post in discussions, so I don't need to repeat myself.

Maybe someone should build a seach engine that only indexes pages without ads. That would mainly be private blogs and wikipedia, I guess.

...that's a pretty good idea, actually. I'd bet that in some way, shape, or form, search engines probably already have the ability to detect presence of advertising. The question is how they work it into the relevancy formula given that the big two search engines are at the same time the big two ad networks.

I wonder if you can just make an extension to filter these out of the google results. Adblocker extensions certainly don't have a hard time detecting ads in webpages.

That's a great idea! I've been thinking about how it would be possible to classify "personal" sites using a common identifier...lack of ads would be a good one, although that would still grab the majority of corporate blog sites.

It would also index a lot of excellent .gov sites that get buried by SEO junk

That'd certainly be an interesting idea, and it'd probably find quite a few intriguing sites and pages.

That said, it also wouldn't be perfect, since quite a few small and personal sites do have ads for whatever reason. Usually because the author thinks hey, even a 0.5% chance someone clicks on an ad will pay better than no ads/a donation link.

Well, there's this search engine: https://wiby.me/

Couldn't agree more.

A place on the internet that you own and can write your thoughts down is very valuable. Yes, there are other services that you can leverage (medium, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, stack overflow, to name a few, depending on your content and desired reach) but your content there will alwybe subject to the whims of others. Big companies aren't always going to have your best interest at heart.

It's a bit of a pain to set up, but as the article states, you get your own space. Writing is one of the ways I learn best, and any writing I do is highly leveragable and can be used by folks far into the future. With your own site, you also have, again as the article states, a place to do low risk but still meaningful technical exploration.

I have had my own site for almost 20 years and look forward to having it for 20 more.

Also, see this post from Dion Almaer about bringing content back to his site vs a third party service:

https://blog.almaer.com/almaer-com-reopens-for-business/

This is the comment I came here for. It's always a good idea to have your own spot on the Internet that you have control over, and can write about whatever you like.

My website is my username DOT org, for anyone who is curious.

Completely agree with the article. I think it's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that can portray you in any light you so choose.

I've been told several times that I was Googled prior to interviews/meetings and have heard great things about my website, my online presence, my books (I have an "author" card when people Google me), etc. Whatever you do to make you stand out is a boon.

> I think it's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that can portray you in any light you so choose.

A logical consequence is that you compete with other vain people online who might choose to stretch the truth a bit more than you do. At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful skill to have?

> At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful skill to have?

Since… forever?

I've had a personal website online since around 1996. I make sure its offensive and hilarious. This is not a new issue lol.

http://www.minions.com/

I'm gonna print that out and point to it when my friend asks what I do at work all day.

Has Illumination Entertainment contacted you at any point to ask for that domain?

I don't think so, if they have its never been serious contact. I get tons of shady offers all the time, I usually delete them.

I don't think everyone must have a website, but I do think many more people would if they realised that the cost and difficulty of setting one up are much lower than they used to be.

A personal site can be about pretty much whatever you want, and look how you want it to look. It doesn't need to be a sales pitch, or on topic all the time. It doesn't need to come top in google when you search for your name. You get to decide why you're building it and who your target readers are (if any).

Like almost everyone I've done the blogging thing on blogging platforms, on hosted traditional sites, on github with jekyll, etc. At some point I always get tired of dealing with it, question why I am even posting something, and what the whole point of it is.

Essentially what I want is a journal, and as my vanity continues be killed, I'm sure I'll eventually go to using an actual paper journal.

Right now I am one step away, I've been using gopher to blog on SDF.org. A huge reduction in audience, and since it is text based, its about as simple as you can get.

I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life.

But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracurriculars. But something like a simple GitHub projects site or more than 50 commits in a year goes a long way to making yourself seem like an active, competent developer. I can count the number of people I've met with semi-active GitHubs at my school on one hand. That's not exactly a vote of confidence for my school's CS program.

I don't see why a student should be measured differently when the developers with full-time jobs are excused with "maybe they just have a life". Some students have jobs outside of school or obligations/hobbies that take precedence over coding projects. I just think everyone should be held to the same bar, even students.

I'm not going to judge someone for having other obligations/jobs/hobbies or whatever else, but if I find a candidate with lots of great blog posts and GitHub projects/contributions in the area I'm hiring them for, I'm definitely going to factor that into my hiring decision vs someone who has none of those.

Well then you're likely missing out on good candidates - and those good candidates you're missing out on are likely to be under-represented. Parents, carers etc. - possibly very competent developers, who just have other commitments. I smell affinity bias.

@scottishfiction absolutely agree.

Yes, but that is happening regardless. Everyone is missing out on good candidates.

Some people can't afford to go to a fancy school and don't have big companies come recruit on campus. Some people can't get certification or evening degrees because they have sick parents/kids to take care of. Some people can't do unpaid internships or make open source contributions that look good on their resume because they rely on the income from a job in retail. Some people can't do well in interviews because they have anxiety or other similar conditions.

I'm sure a lot of them are competent developers, but the reality is that there is no good selection process that tells you that with a good degree of confidence, so you have to look for other signals.

I largely agree with you aside from the final point about resigning ourselves to using these really poor signals. Recruitment is tough to get right, but we should keep improving.

Indeed. We should not make it something mandatory or a reason to deduct points from the dev if they don't have those but it would definitely be a good help if they do have it.

Hiring (for a single position) is a zero sum game. Giving extra points to some people is the same as removing points from all the others.

Well, the developers have full time jobs programming. Students don’t. At best they get a few CS classes that provide hands on, real world programming (albeit usually outdated). I agree that there are certainly students who have time commitments which prohibit them from doing extracurriculars. But I’m not talking about a huge commitment (heh) here. 50 commits over a year is like a few weekends worth of work. If you worked on a project once a month, you’d easy get to 50 commits.

I don’t expect students to code outside of class. But I also believe students who don’t code outside of class shouldn’t expect to get a job just because they have a CS degree.

I can't speak for where you live, but being a student is a full-time job here.

And your last statement makes no sense. If you don't expect students to work after work, then don't follow it up with the remark that you'd see them jobless.

I agree - I had less free time as a student than I do as an average adult with a full time job.

When I was at University all my spare time was taken up by running a student media outlet, playing sports, and volunteering my time to student run services.

I would argue that all of these things have been much more helpful when finding work and interviewing than having Github commits.

And when I'm the interviewer, I certainly don't care how many Github commits someone has. If a new grad can't show me that they have experience working in a team of some description then it isn't going to work out.

Students don't have professional experience in the field and having a blog, projects, etc. can be a useful alternative.

I sometimes wonder if the culture in Europe is different. I don't know a single person working in SWE who has an active GitHub presents or a personal blog. Of course, GitHub wasn't a thing during my college time (subversion was king, not sure if GitHub was available). But even now, of all the things you can do with your free time, why would you choose more coding or writing about coding? The people who are that passionate about coding have to be quite rare.

Personally, I tried to do side projects several times. But after a while I realized, that I really don't care and that it is not necessary for my employment. SWE is just a job, it's enjoyable work, but still nothing but work. I do enough at home to remain employable and to be decent at my job. There is no point doing any more.

You've described the majority of SWEs in the US as well. The HN bubble can distort things quite a bit.

I used to think the same way as you. Until something happened in my life that changed me.

I used to have a very fruitful open source life. I have a personal website, a blog, etc. Some of my libraries are useful and reasonably known on my niche.

Then I had a child. Everything changed after that. I suddenly don't have time or energy to devote to open source any more.

I am the same person as before, but if you looked at my online activity before and after, it's like two different people. If you "give points" to the person who had a lot of personal free time in the past, you'll be missing the one who doesn't know (but is just as capable, he just has other things to do, or less free time).

With students it's the same deal. If you give points to the ones with a very strong online presence you are prioritizing the ones which have the luxury of free time to invest. You will miss on the ones who, say, are taking care of an elderly person, or have to work in the cafeteria every day after class in order to make ends meet.

Indeed.

Unless I find a big chunk of time today, I'm 0/4 on a resolution to write a post a month this year.

Expecting people to build content in their spare time builds in some hefty assumptions on how much spare time and energy they have.

That's completely fair. I don't want to be unduly harsh on people who don't have the time.

But also, am I crazy to ask that people practice even a tiiiiny bit outside of class? I know some people legitimately don't have the time or capability, but that's not everyone. I can't even find 5 people in my school who have a semi active GitHub. It's completely frustrating, as our curriculum is a joke. I don't know how they expect to get a job when our curriculum teaches nothing, they don't do any programming outside of school and they have no other experience.

Bear in mind I don't go to a low ranked school. We just had a professor who won the goddamn Turing Award (easy to guess I suppose). Somehow though we have the most anemic, half-dead CS community.

This is an unbelievable attitude.

"Oh so you call yourself a mechanic, huh? Well you aren't blogging about cars and mechanic-related things in your free time, so I'm suspicious".

"Oh, an architect, huh? You don't have an online presence, which is worrying".

I'm baffled as to why people expect programmers to spend most of their time behind a computer, and to make social git commits or blog about it on top of that.

I program professionally. It's true that I sometimes program after work on personal projects and write for my blog, but I also devote my time to studying Korean, and Japanese kanji. I also draw, spend time with friends, or occasionally play videogames. Programming is exhausting and oftentimes the last thing I want to do is look at code or write about it after work.

And of course, people have things like kids or other responsibilities in their life. College students may have extracurricular activities or work. Not every college student has oodles of free time as you so broadly assume.

We shouldn't have to justify NOT blogging or pushing to github. How dare I have any interests outside of computers and programming. Blegh.

It's unrealistic to expect people to be willing to spend 14-15 hours a day in front of a screen.

While I don't spend the majority of my time programming any more, I still sit in front of a computer most of my work day.

My son has shown a great interest for programming and I really wish I had the time to do it with him more. But the last thing I want to do when I get home is sitting in front of a computer. My love and passion for programming are the same, and fortunately I get to spend most of my active programming and architectural time on things that can consume me completely. But I have a deep integral need to do things like cooking, gardening, training, reading etc.

Before I go to a mechanic I am checking their review online.

Before I hire an artist that would make some graphics for me I would ask for a portfolio. Nobody in graphic industry is surprised when someone asks to show some of their works.

Same with IT, you would try to do some background checking. See if there was some recommendations from person's past employers or some sort of porfolio.

Should it be everything I would use to evaluate person? Hell no! But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate.

Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones. E.g. in Germany if you were hired, everyone though that you were ok, but then they found out that you are shitty, they cannot just fire you. They have to give you head ups that you are underperforming, then they have to make a formal evaluation to make sure that it isn't about them oppressing you and finally they are obligated to propose a recovery plan for you - only after you fuck it up the company is allowed to fire you. So you might end up with a guy not doing enything for 6 months. In such perspective it can be better to miss 2 good candidates than to hire one bad one.

You don't quite get what I was saying.

A review is not written by the mechanic themself once they get home from work, is it? My point was that people don't expect mechanics to go home and start blogging about new tools that they use or the latest in car news. It's an absurd concept, yet it's seen as normal for criticizing and penalizing prospective software developers. Artists are in a totally different boat, where they actually do need a good portfolio to demonstrate their personal style and past work, etc. For programmers they do it through known concepts called "resumes" and "interviews".

> But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate

If I have an accomplishment but I don't blog about it or post on github, did it actually happen?

Not only is this quite preposterous, I literally cannot share code if it was developed under an NDA. I only can discuss vaguely / without specifics in interviews.

> Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones.

Again, you are arbitrarily penalizing people for not being on their computer 14-15 hours a day. You are penalizing people with children. You are penalizing people like me who have interests outside of programming.

Not only is your reasoning absolutely absurd, you are -still- missing out on good candidates. It's lazy, and I would not want to work at a place that hires like this, because it means they do not value personal lives outside of work at all.

People like you are why people feel like they HAVE to blog and HAVE to contribute to open source projects- on their personal time. Fuck that. It's a sickening practice and as I said, it's not expected in other fields. Why is programming the exception here?

> Before I go to a mechanic I am checking their review online.

I've tried that but it's very unreliable. Online reviews are heavily gamed. Bad mechanics have many good reviews. Good mechanics have some bad reviews, or no reviews at all because they are a tiny two-man shop.

How I found a good mechanic was to first take to all the places people recommended. All these were bad. Then I went to a place I saw in my neighborhood run off of a guy's property. Wow, they were great. Went there for years. Then they retired and closed.

Tried a few other places with small jobs. No luck. Tried online reviews. No luck. Saw a hole in the wall on the side of the road in a bad area. Tried taking it there. They are great. They not only have absolutely no online presence, the business doesn't have a name, and they only accept cash. But they always fix my car right.

> Before I hire an artist that would make some graphics for me I would ask for a portfolio. Nobody in graphic industry is surprised when someone asks to show some of their works.

That is very reasonable. But if you ignored their portfolio, and asked them to spend 4 to 50 hours doing a custom project for you at no charge to prove they were good enough, after which you plan on ghosting them, do you think they would be within reason to tell you no thanks? What I just described is the "standard technical interview" in our field.

Myself I have an established reputation and don't apply to jobs any more, unsolicited job offers come to me. Nearly all which I ignore. Anyone asking for work samples should just look around at work I have done during my career. I don't do custom work for free. However I will do such work if I am interested and paid my standard consulting rate.

Oh boy talk about straw man. Look, I directly said I do NOT do this for professionals. If you spend the majority of the day behind a computer programming, you are NOT obligated to have a blog or projects.

And again, I am NOT talking about programming for hours on end for students. 50 commits a year is approximately working on a side project once a month for a weekend, or going to maybe 3-4 hackathons in a year. Maybe that's an unreasonable burden, but that's not exactly a lot of programming.

And y'know what? Other jobs require extracurriculars too. If I wanted to get a job in politics, I'd have to take unpaid internships. If I wanted a job in business, I'd have to network. If I wanted a job in medicine or law, I'd have to study for the MCAT/LSAT. Programmers are no different. If you want a job, you do need to practice outside class.

Again, if you didn't read this and simply want to make an angry reply, I am NOT speaking of full time professionals. Simply students.

Uhhhh... I'm so glad GitHub didn't exist when I was a student.

Some people like to be ghosts online but I really do like to post and write about my experiences whenever I can and it is nice to look back and see what I was doing a couple of months or years ago.

Personally, a website I can just do whatever on is great and I don't have to be worried about a platform's limitations, requirements, or nuances.

Most people prefer simplicity of networks like Twitter, facebook, etc but I really like having my own blog where one blog post is 50 words and another is 1500 words and many other things at the same time. And my individual pages can be anything from experiments to documentation.

> You should...

Except for all the reasons you shouldn't. The biggest reasons is that if putting up a website doesn't feel like a good use of time, it's probably better to just not have one.

An alternative way to think about it is this... is it a good business decision to de-prioritize talking to people who don't have a website? I'd be real surprised if the answer was yes.

One of the benefits not mentioned in the article: it serves as a good personal record of accomplishments or thoughts (similar to a diary). How often does the new year come around and you think to yourself, "where did the year go?"

Once a year?

Why should this be public information, though?

So then keep a diary?

However, the same would apply to community work, etc.

A good personal website isn't only about presenting yourself, but also about respecting the viewer/reader, aligning interests, sharing and the promis to do so in a consistent way, and caring about things in general. If this goes with some brilliant content, this should be making a difference.

> is it a good business decision to de-prioritize talking to people who don't have a website? I'd be real surprised if the answer was yes.

I agree absolutely, as the party seeking individuals this would be foolhardy. But even if all hiring managers acknowledge this, it can still pay for individuals to put up a website, because this allows one to frame and refine ones own ideas, and thus catch the fancy of a potential hiring manager or collaborator preemptively, without requiring that person to be in a room with them and ask the right questions at the right time. Think of it as a way to increase serendipity.

This is an uncompelling piece. I believe the core argument is that you should have a personal website a) because the author was unsettled by his own lack of an online presence and b) a side benefit is that he has somewhere to use tech that is interesting to him but not something he can do at work. There's also an offhand comment buried in there about writing practice being good, and an audience making it easier to stick to.

There's not even a real attempt to turn this into a persuasive piece - it's like it started as a post "why I like having a personal website" and then got a new title and intro paragraph. I'd like to see an attempt to explain why the two major points apply to "everyone" - or perhaps the first one wasn't even intended to be an argument, just background?

Curated online presence > no online presence > bad online presence imho.

That includes personal website and social media.

I've been blogging for 7 years using Wordpress (hosted, with my name as the domain name). It's been a great experience, and I wish I had started earlier. I don't feel any pressure to blog every week or every month, but over the years the content has built up anyway. At an interview recently, I was asked several questions (e.g. What makes a great programmer, What are the most important lessons you have learnt) for which I could point to blog posts I had written.

I've written about my experience blogging here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...

>“You were a complete ghost online.”, they said

Okay, so what? Is it a blogger or promoter position? Otherwise, why should you have any visible online presence?

The whole thing is about one guy who decided to make a personal website and how he made it, that's fine. But why call it "You should have a personal website" without any reasoning/examples for others? I don't get it.

Read the article the whole article.

The author was the interviewer, and the comment came from a candidate that wanted to research his interviewer as preparation for the interview.

The reasoning why he thinks one should have a personal website follows in the paragraphs "Practice" and "Learning".

>the comment came from a candidate that wanted to research his interviewer as preparation for the interview

That's weird as well, I would never research the interviewer (as well as I never got to know the interviewer prior the interview) but instead abouth the company, business, technologies and things like that.

About practice and learning you don't have to have a website, there are many ways to keep your memories and skills up to date.

Because others will. It's an arms race.

Thousands of years ago your ancestors may have asked why they should adapt their teeth to be able to survive on either meat or plants. And it would have been a good question. Nevertheless...

You may want to know: an arms race in what war?

Put another way:

- Who thinks it's a meritorious thing that someone screws around on Facebook, twitter, or personal blogs all the time? - Who specially wants to work for/with the people who do?

Not that it's a bad thing. But why is it a good thing? And why should we think the people who do think it is a good thing are significant?

The war of getting hired in the tumultuous tech industry. Others will sell their brand online, so you will do it yourself, or you will be outcompeted. I don't think it's inherently good to do it, just necessary.

What are people’s thoughts on an ideal personal domain name?

firstlast.com seems the obvious choice, but it gets pompous when used for things you’re the author of but not the subject of, like “andrewredford.com/my-js-library” or “andrewredford.com/notepad”.

fml.com (initials), if you can score a good TLD? flast.com? Create an unrelated but brand-able name like vegandev.com?

I think I get the best of both worlds. Because my domain name is a numeronym of my name. So yes, it is my name (in a sense) and personal, but if you don't know me or care it can be anything. Also, it is really short, which I like. (j11g.com).

I don't think there's an ideal, but your tld is a big part of your brand in the long-run. I don't think it has to be based around your name, but basing it on your universal online handle is also a pretty good way to go about it.

> firstlast.com seems the obvious choice, but it gets pompous

I'm not sure why that would be seen as pompous. It is your site, why not have it associated with your name?

I'm lucky enough to have got <last>.<tld> many years ago as my surname isn't that common (though common enough that <last>.com was already gone). Not that I currently have anything hosted on it (I had a personal site with photos and such, but that long since fell to bit rot as life got busy) but it is still handy for email. I have plans to resurrect it for a small amount of "about me" stuff (on <first>.<last>.<tld> maybe aliased as <first>.<middle>.<last>.<tld> to) and to hang some techie/professional projects off (<project>.<last>.<tld>) when I get of my lazy arse and actually implement some of them instead of just thinking about it all.

Unfortunately, for most people <last>.<tld> is very much no longer an option though. For many <first><last>.<tld> is most likely already gone too. If not to an actual person using the domain, or holding it for future use, then to someone who wants to sell it to you with a 900% markup.

> Create an unrelated but brand-able name

This works. It doesn't even need to be meaningful given that most of the time people aren't really aware of URLs the way they used to be, and many brand names are not meaningful beyond being brand names anyway. Your content matters much more than the name, as long as the name isn't in some way inappropriate to the content. Heck, if you don't need the name for branding purposes just pick a couple of random words from the dictionary until you find a pair/triplet/other that scans nicely, and use that.

I'm lucky enough to have a quite rare name, at least in that specific orthography. There are probably a few dozens of us around, and I have a remote idea of who everybody is.

So I manage to get my name.TLD quite easily (one of them was owned by a distant cousin until recently). I think firstname@name.TLD is pretty much the cleanest email address you could have. And I can spin other addresses for members of my family if needed.

I chose last.me. Looks neat, it's a single meaningful word, and first@last.me looks pretty good too.

I got a devoweled version of my middle name, four letters. Mostly just so I could have my own domain name for email, to get away from google, but I've also started putting up content. Right now it's just recipes, but I'll add other stuff if I find it interesting or important. I do very basic hand-coded HTML, because I'm sick of bloated websites.

I'm not making my site for anyone other than me. Curious people who look at my email address can visit my domain if they want to.

I went with firstlast, except with the .me domain extension rather than the .com (too expensive).

https://www.toddgriffin.me/

I've started blogging on firstlast.com (using my online alias), but by now I've turned it into my de-facto online portfolio. Most of what I publish goes to firstlast.com/project or project.firstlast.com. I don't think there is anything wrong with this approach: I'm not the subject, but it is my project after all.

The only issue I've had with my domain name was chosing my default email address: I did not like first@firstlast.com, so I went for hello@firstlast.com instead.

I use <last>.com which makes for a neat <first>@<last>.com email.

I've had it for more than 20 years. Funny story is that the hosting company keeps being bought, acquired or merged. I think I went through this process 6 times now which meant creating/converting a new account just in time to pay the yearly invoice.

I bought (but don't have anything hosted at)

first + last.slice(0, last.length - 2) + "." + last.slice(-2)

No clue if it's a good idea since I've never actually used it and the unusual TLD may throw people off (especially since it is the TLD for a country I'm not from and have never been to). I just thought it was neat splitting my last name across the "dot".

“I like to look people up before an interview to try to get to know them a bit. You were a complete ghost online.”

Why is this a bad thing?

It's clearly a bad thing if one wasn't intending to be a ghost online.

I've run into this same issue as more and more internet interactions moved onto walled garden platforms, and an unfortunately-named programming language from the fruit company destroyed my previous decade of SEO...

Because hiring people is risky and expensive, so (all other things being equal) companies prefer candidates they know more about.

I was actually saying the opposite: the candidate was telling me that they'd looked up the folks on their interview panel, including me.

I get that, but the context from the article is that of an interviewee looking up the interviewer and commenting that the interviewer was a "ghost" online. To me, that's somewhat bizarre. What bearing does your interviewer's hobbies have on your perception of whether the company and the role would be a good fit for you?

Where I live, it's expected from candidates to show they looked up the company and have prepared a question regarding a project the company is working on or something else about the company itself. So, you actually end up googling the thing.

That doesn't address the question at all.

It makes one an easy target for negative campaigning. If you have no "real" web pages showing your real self, the first hit will be someone else talking trash about you. Or worse, pretending to be you.

A vast and positive online presence is an insurance.

I am a ghost online, and nobody is talk-trashing me.

If someone tells me I am a ghost online, I'll smile and says "correct!!". And if the person is interested, I can explain why.

Questions are opportunities for meaningful conversation.

Why would anyone publicly trashtalk a ghost?

> Why is this a bad thing?

It is not. :)

I kept myself out of the internet for most of my life. Once I reached my 40s, I decided that I was wise enough to share my experiences in a way that can enrich myself and others. And, I think that it was a good call of judgement. I have never hold extreme opinions (ok, I like Windows) but I didn't have enough knowledge to know how companies will value my writing.

Now that I have a career and a long life experience, I feel confident to publish online. I value young people writings, so being young should not be a stopper to have an online presence. But, you need to evaluate how you feel about it and how much you really know what are you doing.

So, maybe to be a complete ghost online can be a good sign that people are thoughtful or that they have a less extrovert character and none of them is a bad thing.

Something about this comments page plays the Trogdor the Burninator song (in the premii HN app on Android). I've never had that happen before, anyone else experiencing it?

It's from a comment with a link to this web site.

http://www.minions.com/

Yeah, seems like the app is prefetching links.

Agree with the article, it does not cost too much effort and gives you online presence.

I am using gohugo + netlify, tried gatsby, jekyll as well. If you are interested how to setup a personal web-site - I've an article for you: https://medium.com/@tarasmatsyk/how-to-kick-off-a-blog-in-2-...

In addition, there should be a search site that only indexes personal web sites.

I was just thinking yesterday of asking HN if people here would be interested in that.

PS: I am not qualified to write such thing any time soon.

As much as i would like this...taken to a logical conclusion, not sure if it would help. Walk with me a bit, and see if this makes any sense (or not)...

1. A new search engine appears and focuses on "personal presence" sites - however a personal presence would be defined.

2. Google, bing, etc. begin crawling this new search engine, and its index of sites.

3. Users by default simply use google, bing, etc. to search for people...but how would google, bing, and other search engines resolve the conflicts of "which is the correct John Doe site?" between the results they've captured (such as on silos/walled gardens) vs results from this new personal site search engine?

Well, if its google, i suppose they'll use some signal like relevance. And, as i recall google uses link authority (big boys pointing to YOU gives you authority, which leads to "relevance" in the eyes of google)...which would suck because the big boy silos likely have a bit more "authority" by way of quantity of links, no? Unless i'm missing something, having another search engine - focused on personal sites - may not help the layperson find your personal site any more than current environment. Please someone correct me if my logic is flawed here, because my scenario is quite depressing.

(Let me caveat that I'm very much a proud supporter of personal websites, and would love having a new/additional "personal site-focused" search engine...I'm just not hopeful that it helps much.)

I started my own online journey as codingbbq which is my alias. I wanted to write articles and have my share of online presence, without connecting to my actual identity. If I wish to look for job or apply to a company, I can always share my website with them. http://codingbbq.github.io

Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier to start blogging. I just mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/

I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

I’ve been writing on my personal site [0] since 2006. Most of it is bad. The early goal was to rank first for my name on google. That worked until an actor with my same name emerged.

A few of my articles have made it to the front page here on HN. The traffic spike and follow on views from peoples newsletters and twitter is fun to see.

But nothing material has ever come from it.

I still enjoy writing on my site. When I’m in a mood where I write twice a week some of it even gets good. Then there will be periods of months where I stop. I tell myself if there was a consistent audience coming back for more I would write more. But that is undeniably the wrong answer to the personal site chicken-egg problem.

I suppose this thread is now pushing our personal sites.

[0]https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com

I don't think it's fair to judge a candidate based on their online presence. Some people are very private, or for whatever reasons prefer not to have an online presence.

Furthermore, if you judge every candidate by the number of linkedin posts and stackoverflow answers or whatever superficial metric than you will miss out on a lot of talented people.

I'm not the type who has an urge to express my opinion or feelings on anything. I've been on Youtube for years and never posted even one comment. Although I always like videos, if I liked them of course.

Oh, I wasn't looking them up--the candidate told me that they looked me up.

My lawyer looked up my profile online. He loved a lot of games I made.

Well don't hold back. What are the games :)

Worked on:

Operation Flashpoint

Virtual Battlespace 2

Virtual Battlespace 3

ARMA

ARMA II

Side project with Titan Vanguard/Outerra. Then left the game industry. Got married, had kids, and now divorced and getting back into larger projects.

I remember spending hours and hours in Operation Flashpoint demo as a kid. Good times :)

Operation Flashpoint was one of my favourite games as a kid. It felt ground-breakingly realistic at the time.

Oh I see, that's a fair point. Perhaps in your case it makes sense to have some presence when you know that people may you look you up. Although, I would still argue that should not be reason enough - unless that it is, you actually want to have a personal website and enjoy writing.

In my case, I often feel like my opinions are so asinine and generally not worth sharing that I just don't feel the urge to set them in stone, so to speak.

Except that, you just did. :)

Exactly, where's that delete comment button...

Mark wrote a great article for my newsletter a couple of months ago and I found his passion really showed through. I think a big part of it is that he's put so much work into his own site.

We need more of this! Especially in 2019.

Aw, thanks Ernie! <3

Terrific thread! Am enjoying reading about personal experiences around "building your brand." In fact, I believe this is so important you should fight your instinct to keep things "pure." And go ahead and contract professional services if you are serious. Hire professional developers, writers, graphics, video, and stylists if necessary ;)

For certain folks just coming up this is de rigeur. If you are a young writer / director trying to break into advertising to gain experience before conquering Hollywood. You need a killer demo reel. Same for a recent MFA grad living in Brooklyn seeking Manhattan gallery representation. An Instagram that tells a visual narrative is way more powerful than a series of unconnected shots.

Furthermore, learning to take a single piece of content. Such as an onstage presentation or demo. And slice and dice it into bite sized content tailored to specific platforms. It is one method for extending your reach 10x. It's the "attention arbitrage" in Gary Vee's Content Model ;)

https://www.slideshare.net/vaynerchuk/the-garyvee-content-mo...

And it's why "free tiers" such as Github Pages, App Engine and 1MB are so important in our community. Not only does it level the playing field. It offsets the risks for experimentation and self-discovery.

"Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself" --Miles Davis

I've been reading the comments for a few hours, and am actually amazed that this is still at the top of HN, so here goes:

I've kept a blog (https://taoofmac.com) for over 15 years, and I've derived satisfaction from it on three main counts: I like to write in general (and keep notes, and the site actually started out as a Wiki of notes covering my migration to the Mac), I like to tweak the code behind it (although new releases are now years apart), and I like the (little) correspondence that comes from people who tackled the same issues (sometimes with different solutions).

As to exposure, it was great fun in the pre-iOS days and when Mac blogs were all the rage. But professionally (and this is the bit where I think some pushback is needed) I get exactly _zero_ benefits from it, because:

- What I write about technically has (by design) nearly zero import on my work, skills or career aspirations

- LinkedIn has become the de facto "show off" (cess)pool, and although I write a few opinion pieces now and then and post them there (and on Medium), the novelty value has largely worn off

In fact, my online presence has, if anything, been a nuisance in my career moves--my currently being at Microsoft and keeping a Mac-related blog is often commented upon, for instance, and many recruiters who approach me via that route usually think I'm a developer (I also have http://carmo.io, but that has essentially zero visibility).

Just checked out your site and wanted to say I really like the visual design. Not sure if you do all your own CSS but it has a great feel/balance on desktop. Well done

Thanks!

On Tao, I decided to go with a Jekyll theme as a base and then proceeded to rip out most of it, starting with the typography, and added lazy loading to make it a better experience on mobile - and the iPad.

The portfolio site is based on a minimalist skeleton CSS. I tend to rely on proven grid/layout bases and tweak the rest to my satisfaction (sometimes obsessively).

Over a decade ago, I had a website. But it seems to me that Facebook killed that urge. As people are now moving off of Facebook, it does make sense for personal websites to return. But people will return with a new perspective.

I’ve done the same, and made one via github about a year or two ago. But it is very different than my older sites. I feel like I have less room to express personal thoughts or design ideas. Everything is more scripted, sanitized, and is trying to sell me to employers.

A personal site is certainly something I've considered a few times. I do like the idea of a space for your own work away from corporate platforms, and having something that comes up when you search for your own name to show potential employers/contacts.

However, I've then always considered against it because:

1. I'm never happy with anything simple, so any new project like this would inevitably become ten times more complicated than it arguably needs to be. Before too long, it'd end up being a tech demo for the ten new programming languages I was interested in learning that week.

May as well put the effort into things with an audience.

2. I genuinely like having some semblance of privacy, and think fondly about the old days when people were encouraged not to share so much information about themselves online. It's why I basically have no pictures of myself on any social media platform, have only about two, maybe three voice recordings online ever, etc. Also feels a bit safer, especially given the ease in which mobs/witch hunts seem to developer over 'controversial' comments and political views.

Having a personal sites seem like it'd lose that, and increase the level of risk in general.

I'm a similar "ghost", and with new projects in the works have been contemplating a big update to my own site. Thanks for the inspiration!

In the same vein, I consider it a dark pattern when companies don’t have a a public email for recruitment purposes. Ideally, every opening should have an associated email answered by a real person. It’s kind of rich to expect candidates to upload custom cover letters, CVs, samples of work, but only expect them to receive template replies. Some companies even state that replies are not guaranteed.

I could see how having a personal website that is basically just your resume could be helpful. If you're a web dev in particular, this kind of thing is essential. However, I don't think having a personal blog is a good idea for everyone. If your posts are all extremely boring and about mundane tasks, then you end up looking very self-involved. Being too funny can come off wrong as well, making you seem crass or like someone who can't be counted on to take things seriously. God forbid you talk about politics or complain about the person who cut you off in traffic.

I'm not saying that having a personal blog is bad, by all means make one and complain about politics, but if you make a website/blog for the sole purpose of helping you get a job, I'd think twice about the kind of content you'd going to put out and how that would reflect to future employers. Having no presence online really doesn't strike me as a bad thing at all.

The author mentions learning how to properly format metadata to have links unfurl nicely in Slack and other social media platforms. Are there any debugging tools that let you see what an URL would look like on all platforms at once, without having to post it everywhere and deal with caches when you have to change the content ?

Unlikely because these platforms themselves control how the content is displayed, and this will likely change often.

I actually started startablog.com to help people with this. We'll actually set up someone's wordpress site for free. We've done several hundred and we're hoping to help 10,000 people make the move.

People keep moving to privatized networks and there's nothing that beats owning [yourname].com

I have no identity online, except for Facebook and Linkedin. Linkedin is the only one that is public. I don't even have a photo.

I've been careful since about 1997 to always ensure that I don't attribute myself to anything I've written. Even accounts like this I'm always careful to write things that won't identify me ever, unless I did it completely on purpose (a blog post for my employer, etc). I learned very early on that the things that get written are forever, and I didn't want something I wrote 20 years ago to come back to haunt me.

I rejected a handful of candidates for things they wrote on Twitter (ex. "old people should give up their right to vote because they don't matter anymore", "SF is a piece of shit and everyone that lives there is a piece of shit").

I don't think many people will write something that reflects them negatively when it's long form content.

That's why Twitter is such a giant-killer.

A side note:

Author mentions <sidebar> but as far as I know (and after searching for it too) this element does not actually exist. Modern browsers fallback to <div> rendering for anything they don't know but it's not exactly semantic web either.

There's the ‘aside’: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/as...

I use <aside> on my side which is I was intrigued by the mention of <sidebar>. The author also uses <sidebar> on the site rather than the usual <aside id/class="sidebar">.

I actually meant to use <nav> — just a silly mistake. I've corrected the article since.

Hi Mark

For accessibility your sidebar could be a <header> containing a <nav> with the links in that. This <header> can precede the <main> content. The title for the links should be in the <nav> so it outlines properly and the heading for the <header> or the <nav> doesn't need to be <h1>. <h1> is best kept just for the article, not anything else.

If the <header> containing the <nav> precedes the <main> you can style it to look like a sidebar. Why bother? Well, try it and then see how the page opens with Firefox Reader Mode. You should see the difference, the reader can jump past the header 'landmark' to the article.

If you want to go fully HTML5...

The newsletter signup could be in an <aside> rather than a <div>.

Then with the article, it is nice to see use of <figure>, I have no evidence but I believe Google likes that. You can also try breaking down the article into <section> sized chunks, with the <h2> headings at the top of each <section>. This should compartmentalise each 'section' into a way that search engines might prefer. Amongst the <section>s the <aside> for the newsletter can slot in, outlining nicely. Ideally the newsletter <aside> also has a heading.

Footnotes. If you change 'name' to 'id' then you will get top scores on validation. Nobody will ever notice or care, but you don't want validation errors do you?

Also check out this:

https://codepen.io/SitePoint/pen/QbMgvY

Really cool footnotes using CSS counters.

Why bother?

Well, you have taken HTML5 so far and not much is needed to go exemplary. In a world where everyone is up to speed on web technologies few get the actual HTML right. You might not know the latest funky web technology but it is always useful to point out how HTML5 could be done using the full vocabulary instead of just <div> mumblings.

I've had some interesting conversations sparked by my personal website (linked in profile). Friendships, even. I don't blog as much as I like to, I'm embarrassed by some of the content at times, but overall I'm pleased with it.

I'm going to have to throw myself in the camp of those who don't have much interest in publishing a page or blog. I suspect that it would either be ignored or result in protestors setting up outside of my house.

If a strong urge to write presented itself, I rather like the idea of self-publishing either a novel or a non-fiction book on something I know a reasonable amount about. It not only would force a certain discipline to writing and study for the author, but would serve as my tiny push towards encourage long-form reading again as opposed to the modern urge to read things that fit on a computer screen (like I'm doing here of course).

Somehow related (pretty good in my opinion): https://www.troyhunt.com/the-ghost-who-codes-how-anonymity-i...

For more reasons why this might be a good idea, see https://indieweb.org/why.

Another reason to have a personal web site is that it allows you to define your digital identity. If you don't, other people or worse, corporations, can easily publish documents, texts, tweets or something else that will make you look in a certain way.

You don't have to post amazing pictures or publish Paul Graham essays, publish once a year and having the link in your email footer is enough to establish to others who you are

Don't see how you could be a ghost online with a name like Mark Christian. There would be a ton of Mark Christian's all vying for attention.

Life is tough when your first name is just a word. :P

All the more reason that you would be a ghost, since you are now competing with all of them for search result ranking.

With a name like Zigurd, SEO isn't a problem. Nor was registering the .com. A very simple site that points to Amazon and other places with information in context is useful. Google Sites is free and simple, and it is no longer sucky looking and retro. It took longer to do the "do you own this url" dance with Hover's DNS tab for the url than it did to create the site.

I think GitHub profile maintenance as a service would be quite a business model for body leasing type of consultancies (that cater a particular industry sector) ... for individuals, it would not be very sustainable.

Actually, a lot of work maintained by consultancies is half finished non production shovelware, so they probably already do this themselves.

I put up a very simple bio page at https://nojvek.com a while back and that gets me decent inquiries here and there.

I don’t think I can blog regularly with 2000+ word articles.

That’s awesome but it makes me feel I should rather be writing 2000 words of code and building something. Just me.

Once I remember a coloring app developer, calling for artists to be featured in their app.

Requirement: Portfolio and Instagram profile with a considerable amount of followers. I mean, it's perfectly understandable. Who will want to feature unknown artist in their app — but you know what, screw it.

I agree and I just so happen to have built a Jekyll theme for personal sites that’s kinda good for hackers & nerds and is available here: https://hydejack.com/ (it’s based on the Hyde Jekyll theme)

Content aside, this is a great minimalistic blog without the usual trackers/bloat -- it's rare to uBlock blocking 0 assets. Seems to be built with Jekyll https://jekyllrb.com/

"how to design web sites that respect the notch on iPhone X and friends"

i'm a notch disrespecter

This somehow reminded me of John Carmack's .plan files [0].

[0] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

Out of curiosity: do you draft on paper or do you go straight to the text editor?

Now all browsers have removed the RSS feed button, here's his! https://writing.markchristian.org/feed.xml

Technical blogging isn't all about all about showing off. I write because I want to share what I am up to hence share in the form of articles. That's the other thing that I got leads as well.

IMHO, a personal website that is super out of date looks worse than one that doesn't exist. My website is a good example of this (being out of date). So I recently removed it from my resume.

It seems the opposite is true in academia where most academics have a personal website but the normal style is best described as “mid 1990s”.

By out of date, I meant lacking any recent content.

if there is a native markdown driven, login supported, file-based(no database), online editor supported blog platform that transforms both code and markdown to html5, I will start tech blogging right away.

drupal and wordpress users for years and I keep looking for a simpler solution, no not the static site generators which has no online editor and no login support either.

I plan build one with python/flask, then I will have my personal site.

People are going to look for your name so you can influence the results that come up through a personal website.

If you wanted to start one, what would be the easiest way of doing so, preferably an all static site. ?

As a developer, a very natural choice would be Github Pages and Jekyll [1]. If you're not a fan of having your whole site out in the public like that, you can also use Jekyll locally. I'm sure there's other similar static site generators, but Jekyll is pretty widely used and in my opinion easy to get started with.

[1] https://jekyllrb.com/docs/github-pages/

Yep, Jekyll is what I use, and I quite like it. I'm not hosted on GitHub pages though.

GitHub Pages

What font does he use on this website? I can't find it in the source, but it looks really nice.

For the main paragraph content it's "Helvetica Neue". For the main headings it's "Arial Rounded mt bold".

I wouldn't expect a younger person to have a personal website, given that it's almost impossible to come up with a domain name that's not taken. For instance, my real name is also Mark Christian. What am I going to do, register markchristian1.org? theothermarkchristian.org? Might as well not have a website at that point.

No it isn't. There were like 100000 new tlds added. Basically any name you can think of is available on one of the tlds. Also most personal websites don't use the authors name as the domain name. Most dev blogs I have seen have some strange name but have their real name in the text of the website so it will show up when searched.

As long as you sign your name to blogposts you’d be fine on a domain such as yeehaw.baby

The domain is irrelevant, provided you own it. Choose whatever you like from the remaining .coms or the hundreds of new TLDs. If your name is in the content and you're smart about meta descriptions and title tags, the domain isn't an issue for a personal site.

Have a personal web site and a blog! Great idea, will work on it :)

Fascinating how I agree with the headline and disagree with the article completely.

Personal websites are a lot easier to control and chronicle what you want them to. They also help with SEO and also community building if you desire that.

When I didn't desire that, I was very content being a "need to know senior engineer" behind the scenes. I gamed my third-party recruiters to do all the work for me and we all made money.

Always post anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.

I think you are just lazy, and there is no problem with that. Anyway, laziness is a sin, and some philosophers classify this sin as "the loss of taste for life", which is not good for you.

Sins are a social construct. Laziness is a state of being that many people aspire to, but few can realistically achieve without serious detriment.

Oh no! Not all sins are a "social construct". But I do agree with the rest of your post. True laziness with a degree of comfort and lack of anxiety is quite difficult.

> Not all sins are a "social construct".

Yes, even those sins where the social construction of them as sins has some social utility are social constructs.

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