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Why Personal Websites Matter
latif writes "Lately personal websites have fallen out of fashion. Some term them as vanity sites, and others are scared of privacy concerns. The article Why Personal Websites Matter discusses some reasons as to why they have to be embraced to stay competitive." I see the personal website as the virtual equivalent of the front of one's home, except that most virtual homes have large signs in the front yard that give a running play-by-play of the inhabitants. Just like one's home, it may be prone to vandalism, but it's far easier to make one's website be an expression of oneself, than to put up large signs outside!
but, in practice, there are far too many useless, egotistical homepages
But those are just a reflection of the personality of the website's owner. It takes all kinds to make up the real world. Likewise, it takes all kinds of websites to make up the online world.
The analogy of a website being the online home of a person is very valid. You'll see so many garishly decorated homes in real life... while a few tastefully done, organized and neat houses. That does not mean one should go around criticizing the unorganized, tackily decorated ones. Its a matter of personal taste. After all, thats why they're referred to as personal websites.
Smartness has very little to do with taste!
Blogs, on the other hand, are like standing on the porch and talking aloud... airing views... sharing news.
I think there is no more room on the net for "personal" websites. How many people here have run a blog or any other storehouse of personal info and at one point in time has it been used against you? For me it was about 6 times. Three with my school/university and 3 due to friends reading something and assuming it was them.
I think the net is great for writing about your intrests and perhaps form a community around it such as CG, Legos or Evil Dead movie series. However having personal info on the web is usually extreamly dangerous and can at times be annoying. I remeber how I at one time had a collection of 50 poems on my site but took it down after a peer decided that half of it was about her and started to complain to me about how she though I was a dick for bitching at her indirectly.
Now adays my old personal website is technicly amazing but I post no content on it. I guess live and learn.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
The world is our village. People all over the world communicate with each other. How to better share views, information and the occasional picture with your (potential) friends than with a personal website. Personal websites show initiative and fill the need/right of every person to express himself/herself. Sure there are other means of doing that! And most people do! Not only nerds have personal websites. It is an online extention of your opinions, your way of living. When I meet someone in the real world, I tend to look for a personal website when I come home at night.
On the issue that most personal websites suck (technically speaking), I can only say that I prefer old-fashioned HTML4/XHTML standard based website, above any corporate full-of-fancy-animations expensive marketing tool. Websites should be build to last. This is not accomplished using ever changing proprietary plug-ins, etc... You can make a *very* nice webpages without all this. (I'm one of those people who refuses to install the plug-ins I'm talking about.)
Don't forget the Internet [was/is] all about sharing information!
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
>Idiot. Stop linking to disgusting shit.
I take it you must have seen a picture of a penis when you clicked-through (as I did, and rated it a 1 before I got to girlie pics). But is a penis "disgusting shit?" I have one, so I don't think so.
Subjectivity is one of the most compelling things about personal home pages, and your comment is an interesting proof of the parent's point. While the link isn't really a home page of sorts, you've formed an opinion about it, and a negative opinion at that; much as we tend to do when we stumble upon someone's attempt to use up their 10 meg allotment at Tripod. What if it turned out that the site was operated by your nextdoor neighbor, or a cow-orker? I imagine it would significantly change your opinion of that person. I confess, were I to discover that it was my neighbor, I'd probably think different(TM) about them too.
These days, you have to be careful what you say online. Or even offline for that matter. We've slipped into an inescapable trap of politically correctness, where you can be fired for complimenting a female colleague on her appearance / fashion, or for snapping a benign photo of a delivery truck at your building's loading dock. And while that innocuous "hey Lisa, nice dress!" comment might disappear after a nanosecond at the office, if you dare blog the fact that Lisa from 2 cubicles over has a nice dress on today, it can damned sure come back to haunt you later.
Sucks, because it didn't used to be that way.
We've been recruiting recently and I always do a quick google search to see if I can find the person on the net.
I think about 10 - 20% of the candidates that we've seen have had their own sites, and I can say that on the whole it doesn't help them at all.
You can tell quite a bit about a person (particularly in the ubiqutous "My Pictures" section that every site seems to have) - and there have been a couple of candidates whose "extracuricular" activities have made me decide against interviewing them.
For example, there was a guy who it transpires was a dead keen club DJ who spent most nights of the week working in clubs on a freelance basis and clearly was partial to the odd pill to get him through his set - I decided that this wasn't the kind of guy I wanted working in my development team.
That said, I'm pretty open to people doing whatever with their life, as long as it doesn't affect their work.
The big thing is that people who write them concentrate their minds. One of the areas I must post some things on (when I get some more time) is local foods to my area. I buy a lot of locally produced, high quality foods (often organic) and often tell people about new discoveries. I want to be able to tell those people that they can just check my blog and get the latest from there (or use RSS).
In the beginning everyone just copied from each other and didn't know what else to put on there.. the net then wasn't really interesting or useful.. was just a way to put some documentation online. Some people started to make a homepage and others copied this.
I too had a 'homepage' which said who I was and what I liked and even listed my cd collection.. (and of course the links to homepages of irc friends)(aaargh I can't believe I admit this)
Worst of all it was at a free provider of which I lost the password so it was online between 1995 and 2000 until by coincidence I found out it still existed so I contacted the admin who luckily removed this content.
Anyone else have similar stories of content online long after its due time ?
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
Say what you like, I got my first job after graduating simply because I had published my resume online and an employee of the company had found it in a web search. I had never heard of the company and would otherwise probably never made contact with them. Self advertising is not necessarily egotistical - we all do it sometimes.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Apple has recognized that all it's spiffy user apps are not complete without a distribution channel. .mac account. Of all the features I've seen, this has to be the greatest and most usefull.
.mac account makes file updating easy, you don't even need an FTP client, it's quite seamless as the .mac account management interface is built into the OS.
.mac ripped off in MS's Longhorn, but that will be in 2006. Apple has 2 years to cram their service full of features to keep a leg up.
.mac as well as iPod/iTMS. Allowing users to compile playlists that are actually streamed by iTMS rather than the user account.
Basically, they've recreated the homepage as an extension of your desktop, laptop or iPod.
This also helps productivity. One of the projects I am a member of uses iCal synching between developers via a
The direct integration between the OS and your
Ultimately, I would not be surprised to see
<wishful_thinking>
Perhaps an extension of the music store is in order to beeef up
Apple opened the door for industry wide licensing without getting sued, perhaps they can now convince them that streaming already purchased music as a form of fair use on the users behalf can work too.
The major difference being that iTMS/Apple would act as the middle man, there by providing oversite to the system as a whole, something Kazaa/Morpheus et al fail to do.
</wishful_thinking>
To be honest I must say that I thank them for this. When I use google, or any other search engine, the last thing I wish to find are personal websites with unpopular content. While creating sites and sharing them with the world is something everyone can do, making good sites with good content is not. I can only see an advantage with this system as a site now needs to struggle more to remain popular.
Diego Rey
diegoT
I disagree. I think you need to have meaningful content in order to get a good PageRank. I've built up a website to 88,000 hits in 6 months by doing three things: writing content, writing lots of it, and making sure it stays on topic. By the next GoogleDance, my site was within the top 5 for many relevant queries. No advertising, no incoming links. So really, just make sure your site doesn't suck, and Google will like it a lot.
--Quentin
Yes, because companies never have websites with their details on. Companies never operate/trade etc in public view, allowing opinions of them to be formed and perhaps shared/disseminated by mass media or even individuals on their 'blogs.
Yet, companies seem kind of reluctant to openly post "we support government X that randomly kills thousands at a whim" kind of information on their website, while personal websites might contain such shamefully incriminating nuggets as "I like Dilbert" or "I'm a X denomination Y believer".
Did you know that in some countries, employers can't ask applicants to supply a picture with their resume? That's to prevent employees from only inviting white folks to interviews. Any idea where that came from? Because it happened.
And yes, every slashdot post is potential incriminating material.. "He once said Foo about company Bar, and they're a client of ours".. "He made a Pointy Haired Boss joke!".. Etc. etc.
So yes, I have a bland website. Just as bland as any corporation's website.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
"For example, there was a guy who it transpires was a dead keen club DJ who spent most nights of the week working in clubs on a freelance basis and clearly was partial to the odd pill to get him through his set - I decided that this wasn't the kind of guy I wanted working in my development team.
That said, I'm pretty open to people doing whatever with their life, as long as it doesn't affect their work."
Is this some kind of joke?
That was classic intercourse!
Is the most ignorant and stupid phrase I've read this month. It's *almost* like saying "unorganized, lazy, and stupid people want to hide these qualities by <put random activity here>". Tech gusy like this one are one of the reasons programmers are tought by some people to be great jackasses....
PS: And of course this is a definitely helpful argument when trying to convince someone of the advantages of a personal website...
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
but, in practice, there are far too many useless, egotistical homepages.
that isn't the problem.... the problem is that ther are way too many personal webpages with at least 60-70 animated gif's, midi music on each page, and aniumated gif's to make the BLINK tag come back again..
then we have those that cant code HTML so they use frontpage, and we have banners, page transition effects and everything else than causes a large number of viewers to puke from overload.
BAD TASTE far outweighs any ego problem.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Thanks guys :)
Just out of interest, since I posted that comment, I've gotten just under one hit per minute (51 hits in 56 minutes). I'm still laughing.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
In the 18 or so months that I've been keeping a blog, I've written more than 100,000 words on everything, from TV and album reviews, to political scandals and "popular science".
The point, in my case, is not really the content: it's the visible improvement in my writing skills that is being translated to other offline projects. I work in a building housing people from all across Europe, and I get English spelling, grammar and usage queries several times a day, every day. Who was it who said "the point of a journey is not to arrive"? (I know it was Neil Peart, but he was quoting someone else, I think.) I write to learn more about writing, so I have a sharp pen if I see a sword coming my way!
(this is not a
The last time I had anything resembling a personal web page was in 1995 when I thought it'd be cool to write on in this fancy HTML markup. I soon realized nobody visits it anyway and it was lame, so what's the point? Does anyone really give a shit that I am a Star Trek fan along with 10 million other dorks on the Internet?
I see blogs as being even worse. It's like having an open diary and feeling your life is important enough that anyone really cares to read it. It's the epitome of egotism. Face it, people don't care about the average person in this world, only the rich and famous.
a HTML3 page will validate as a html 4 page.
Hell I can make a HTML1 page validate as HTML4.01 strict.
he is right, use as SIMPLE of a page as possible to get the job done. I also refuse to use HTML4 tags unless I need them. it's just stupid to use a CSS sheet when it's not needed.
Well here's a little story...
Just over a year ago, I got some kind of bug bite (or at least that's the assumption). A big red spot developed around it which kept growing so I went to the doctor. The doc gave me a shot and an assortment of pills to stop the itching/inflammation.
So, what's that got to do with blogs? Well, later that night I got the hiccups. After maybe an hour, they went away. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with hiccups again and couldn't get rid of them. Since I couldn't sleep, I decided to do some googling and found another person talking about this side effect of the drug on their blog. My doctor of course thought I was a nut when I asked her about it even after I found a write up from the company that makes the drug listing hiccups as a possible side effect.
This person's blog was just about their life and battle with some disease. While I wouldn't have found it all too exciting under normal circumstances, I appreciate the fact that I was able to get useful information from it when the need was there.
As for my doctor, well I won't be going back there. I don't really care to have a doctor that blows me off when I tell them there's something wrong with me after they just shot me full of drugs.
On the other hand, I cannot help but notice how running into the wrong person [politically correct employer, boy/girlfriend, football coach, bad cop, etc.] with excellent Googling skills, can easily manage to ruin your life completely, by marginalizing you out of existence, to the extent that nobody wants to hire or date you and where even your old highschool pals fake not recognizing you on the street, because whatever you posted on your website went against the grain.
This leaves open the question of whether freedom of speech and democracy really mean anything anymore.
The game used to be played along this famous French writer's motto that "I might vehemently disagree with what you are saying, but I'll die to preserve your right to say it." Likewise, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau once told his son (quoted at the funeral) to "Never attack someone personally. You can publicly attack their ideas, but never touch their dignity as a human being."
Unfortunately, in a world where anything you say can and will be used against you at some point, before you have been accused of anything, even whenever you have not broken any law, simply because people fear the stigma of guilt by association, it appears that we have reached a point where those old standards of respect are no longer true.
This being said, lately, I've been asking myself why I even bother maintaining a diminutive website:
I haven't created much in terms of music, photography or ever writings in ages, which already puts a big question mark over whatever content might qualify for publication. Then, already, I've had a few employers actually mention having a problem with me stating boldly on my About My CV... page that "I am quite competent in Windows 3.11/95/98/NT/2000 administration and in Office 95/97/2000 usage, but flatly refuse to use any Microsoft product."
[of course, in a world where the majority thinks that getting a job should be the only priority anyone ever had, and where companies can fire anyone for the most laughable excuses, standing up for your beleifs and values, by refusing to work in certain fields or within a certain framework, has become suicidal, but that's another issue entirely - then again, it says a lot about how little freedom capitalism actually offers: choose freedom or money, but you cannot have both unless what you think is whatever the Ministry of Disinformation has rubber-stamped]
Given the combined current lack of content and problem in stating preferences for anything non-mainstream, I'm starting to think that the only thing left to put on a website is a politically bleached version of my CV and a generic photo to recycle with job applications and such. Then again, might as well upload the damn thing to Monster's CV repository and start using throw-away e-mail accounts for anything, at which point nobody needs an ISP or personal website anymore. *sigh*
Damn! I beleive I just created a second dot-com doomsday scenario... Sorry to all startups who will close shop as a result! :P
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
My web page has this big disclaimer at the top:
Please excuse this page, it is really old, and a lot of the stuff here is pretty lame. Sue me, I am not a web developer.
I use my personal web space for, well, personal stuff. I use it to post pictures, so I can email friends/family a URL instead of sending them a 15MB zip file of pictures. I get a few hits here and there for various things I host. There is nothing exciting about my website, but I have had one up since 07-26-1996. I still have those pages, kind of as a nostalgia piece. I still edit my pages by hand, simple HTML.
I used to be very active in the martial arts, and before search engines were useful, I had one of the most visited sites related to martial arts. It was a page of links that I maintained. I frequented rec.martial-arts, and people would email me pages they wanted added. I did it all by hand, and eventually that caught up to me. I had about a hundred requests in my inbox, and I didn't have the time to maintain it. I "retired" the page when AltaVista made it possible to find just about anything on the net anyway. Maintaining a link page didn't make sense anymore. Hey, my personal website was featured in the September 1996 issue of Boardwatch magazine. Lame now, but at the time I thought "this is pretty cool".
I think the beauty of personal websites is that they can be as little or as much as you want them to be. It is expression. You can be a droning, self-involved egomaniac and run a blog where you prattle on about your daily activities, or you can just post pictures for your family. You can do whatever you want, that is the point.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
While I agree that a lot of personal websites are horrid, I have one under my own domain name for the following reasons.
/. readers. They are for sharing with family and friends. Wait until you have grandkids - you'll understand.
It's for family and friends to keep in touch. There's a calendar there to remind them of family events and birthdays. Kinda like Central Headquarters for my family.
There's a page for my high school's alumni to stay in touch without going to classmates.com.
As long as I pay the bill, I have a permanent email address. And I can add/remove/change email addresses at will.
Yes, there are family photos there. They are not there for
I also have genealogical information on the site. Personal websites are invaluable for researching your family tree. If you knew my name, you could google it to find out who my great-great-great-great-grandfather was. I've found relatives I didn't know I had from all over the country.
It may truly suck bigtime in the eyes of some, but it's my site and I'll design it the way I want. I'm not stupid enough to post the url here. Who wants to be slashdotted?
I don't write blogs, have read enough of them to know they are -- when viewed from the outside -- pretty vapid and silly sounding. However, most of them are really nothing more than open letters to their friends.
To me that's good. At one time it looked like phones were going to kill the fine art of letter writing, blogs appear to be the infancy of a new style of letter.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
What does make me wonder is why the obscure page with a few oddball pictures of myself gets more hits than the whole rest of that section combined (or for that matter, how they get to it without going thru the main site).
If you are able to look at the referrer logs from your web server, those questions would be answered. It can be pretty amusing, by the way.
When I was at Cornell, my web page mentioned that I lived in "beautiful Ithaca, NY", and that I worked on "mathematical models in biology". I found that some people ended up at my home page after searching for "beautiful models".
I also wrote a children's story about a monkey, and had some info about it on my web page, along with pictures of a magazine it was published in. By far the most popular way people found my web pages was via searching for "monkey pictures", it's mind-boggling how many people were searching for that. But this was my favorite. You know how with some search engines you can search for some terms, but exclude others? Well, one person found my web page after doing a search for "monkey pictures", but excluding "sex"! It really made me wonder what they had found before, that caused them to add that exclusion term...
There have been many disappointed people coming to my web pages over the years (yeah yeah, 'cause my web pages are crappy, right?)