Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website
cheapskatesguide.org
cheapskatesguide.org
Getting another email 3-4 times a week is a big commitment, and it would be nice to get a sampler of what we're signing up for
EDIT: The website also says that it's a link per day, but your comment says "every other day". A daily link would be an even larger commitment
I'm not sure how to link to previous emails, but here is a sample of previous links: https://mix.com/thinkingaboutthings.
It started out as an every day email, but readers told me that every other day would give them time to read the articles.
Similarly, the author seems to mistake the difficulty in the question of "What country was George Washington born?" which is primarily the question of what does that even mean? The country that the spot of his birth became or the country which ruled the spot of his birth at the time? In fact, I'm not even sure what answer the author thinks is correct. Washington was a British subject (citizen? not sure) at birth but the "clue" the author provides seems to try to hint that Washington was born "in the US" whatever that would mean prior to the US's existence.
Nonetheless, I stand by the author's overall sentiment that facts should be connected together and not simply memorized, and the other examples were good.
[1] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/07/was_brontosaurus_a_h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus
He was an officer in the British colonial army before he became a traitor and a revolutionary, though. That's fairly well known so maybe the "trick question" is that he was actually born in the modern day US?
A query though - Is it possible to have some verification of the "top 100" personal sites claim? For example, years ago if you searched for "Sumerian gods" - you would get all manner of results, but nowadays you will always get Wikipedia as the top link, junk mixed in, and then other factual sources if you keep digging.
Wikipedia having top spot is not always necessarily a bad thing because ultimately most people searching likely want a factual source - or at least a source they trust. However, as a result of the two algorithms (and no doubt many more) we have a bunch of "junk" links in between the top link and the other interesting links. Even Britannica ranks lower than the junk links.
What I mean by "junk" links is the "Top 10 Best Sumerian Gods", etc. These frequently contain content lifted from other sources - including each other, spam-like advertising, and simply prey on the search engine's algorithms to get on to the front page beating the interesting content down into pages 3,4,5 and beyond. There's entire sites devoted to "how to" game the search engines, as is to be expected with any automated system.
Yes, the algorithms could be better - Britannica and other factual sources shouldn't be below "Top 10" lists, but so could the ethics of those who run sites purely for advertising revenue.
Conversely, better results are shown on page 1 for "Elizabeth I".
Better known as chum: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
Just make sure your ad-blocker is working before clicking on them and it's all gravy.
It’s important to develop a personal brand, but also to share knowledge. My personal, unquantifiable goal, is saving a million man hours through my blog posts. So many things are implemented or explored, but never shared. Knowledge in a vacuum is useless to society.
I wish more people would do this (write and attempt to rank content), it’s what makes the internet revolutionary (not the memes or messages).
At first glance, I thought, "No, that's what broke the internet." Because I was thinking of all the spammy articles I find at the top of the search results.
But I see what you mean. People with useful insight should try to rank their personal/niche content. First page of Google Search used to show me articles from personal websites 10+ years ago, not anymore.
Unfortunately, if I write a blog on my personal website, nobody is going to find it. And I don't like Medium for their policy of forcing people to paywall their content in return for visibility.
If I post a link to a blog post on my website to Facebook, Facebook downranks it and doesn't show it to most of my friends (seriously, WTF).
The only thing I can do is post the actual text on Facebook, if I want people to read it, but there's a limit on post length, and in-line media isn't supported.
When I do write proper blog posts, the lack of an audience doesn't bother me anymore. It is (as they say) what it is. It's also liberating: I can write what I like without fear of reprisal or the need to justify myself - an online occasional diary, if you like. Last year I built a new website to collect together all my writing work. I included some blog functionality in it and rescued a bunch of posts from old Blogger blogs. It was fun to read them all again[1].
I, too, loathe Medium's business model. If I see a potentially interesting post here on HN which links to that site, I've taught myself not to click the link.
It's such a long-term reward that can be hard to quantify when talking to people who operate in a "long-tail passive income" mindset.
I've kept my website about an obscure drum machine (the Boss DR-110) operating since 1999, I still get occasional emails about it, and I absolutely can see how what I've shared has shaped the drum machine ecosystem in little ways in the intervening years, from modifications people came up with and shared back, to hardware implementations from hobbyists, to the addition of its circuitry to modern mass-manufactured clones of similar hardware. Literally every copy of the schematics on the internet came from the service manual that I bought on eBay, photographed, and scanned from the negatives at what I thought was an absurdly high resolution at the time.
When my wife's M-Audio AV40 speakers developed a buzz, she found and replaced bad capacitors, and over the last seven years, has seen a stream of comments from people expressing thanks for showing them how to give their own problematic speakers new life.
His site has the look of a personal webpage from 1997, but since retiring, he still works on articles and publishes them on his site. His site is a mix of scholarly articles (Anthropology), old syllabi, and personal stuff.
Tools are just means to an end and overrated compared to the actual end.
Changing quarterly to the "most efficient" tool is a lot of work over time.
Sticking to one seems to get things done.
And static websites save you the headaches of security - I think your father can't imagine what it means having to patch a critical bug in node/php/mysql/whatever during your vacation when travelling.
And I guess, he may not think of this kind of publishing as being for the "technically minded" or "tech-savvy" ones only.
And the stuff can be read in ages to come.
My setup is (almost) free, mostly built on open components (so, no vendor lock in) and pretty low-latency. See if you'd like some inspiration on how to setup something similar for yourself: https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/posts/58-setup-blog-and-email-...
I'm just sick of breaking updates.
Search and comments are radical: https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-making-of/
Example: I was reading https://www.jefftk.com/index yesterday which also included webring.
Lily's Inxed page and RSS feed are from a script I wrote that does it manually: https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/lilyrs...
I wrote about this some here: https://www.jefftk.com/p/helping-the-kids-post
It's important to share knowledge to next generations. This technology was invented around the time I was born
2) Would love if you made a link out of "Homelab" in your About Me sidebar, which linked to a post explaining what it is. I just read about a "homelab" on HN yesterday, and would like to know more!
[0]: https://aarontag.dev/ [1]: https://geekring.net/
It would be nice to have branching webrings, so that a site in one webring that also "bridged" to a different ring, or a more specific topic (or less) could also link there.
As always there is the problem of curation.
There's a school of thought w.r.t. project documentation that encourages beginners to write beginner focused documentation since the people who are experts on the project don't always have the perspective to effectively communicate to beginners.
I love finding out-of-the-way personal websites.
A while back I did my own implementation of "lets make hard-to-discover things slightly more discoverable"
Every time you visit the website, you get a different personal website, as submitted by hacker news users a while back:
Set up a links page for a few of them, if anyone's curious in a personal site scene that's different from tech: http://www.kradeelav.com/link.html
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so...
Sure you can just go to HackerNews and see what people are submitting, but what if you want to be the person who submits that amazing post for those sweet sweet Internet points? Just use one RSS reader site and fill it with EVERYTHING. Load random person OPML from Github, blogs and whateve.. and every once in a while, scroll through the titles, see if anything is remotely interesting, and if it turns out to be gold, put it on HN or your Mastodon account or Lemmy or (barf) Reddit or whatever.
Not everyone is gonna have your mad RSS skills. Other people have real lives and can barely digest what Twitter and Facebook feed them.
And by scrolling through stuff, you're not getting doused by those bullshit algorithms. You're in control of how you view, sort and filter your feed (and maybe use another RSS reader or one that supports profiles for the important stuff).
And the game... is afoot.
I don't know how sirodoht manages it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
That listing led to a local newspaper reporter contacting me for a story about people who had web pages. I had a nice big quote in the article about how this new medium broke down the barriers to publishing and allowed all us common people to have our own voice broadcast out without needing to play the big publishers games or having to worry about the finances involved in publishing content.
I suppose much of that is still alive today, though definitely yoked by the social media companies' stranglehold on content publication by the masses.
Many of us forgot that technical knowledge was a barrier to online publishing. Even if you used a program that made website development as simple as using a word processor, you still had to figure out how to secure space to host the site and how to upload the site. Those applications simplified that as well, yet all of those simplified steps still led to many books to guide people through the process.
Yes, there were other factors at play. Social media and biased search engine results were certainly part of the reason.