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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!
"Of course unorganized, lazy, and stupid people want to hide these qualities by not having a website" So that is why I have been having a hard time getting hired.. and here I thought it was the economy. Thank god all I have to do is create a snappy website!
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
Personal websites are a good idea, in theory -- but, in practice, there are far too many useless, egotistical homepages. That was maybe acceptable in the infancy of the internet, but people are getting smarter now. Blogs are better because they give what people care about -- your opinions and knowledge -- without the self-advertising.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I don't know about you, but work is a large part of my life. Seems that the corporate control of the net has kicked in once again...
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Rate Naked People (Not work-safe)
Does this mean we'll start to see a reduction in the number of sites withe neon text on a black background, animated GIFs and "under construction" signs? It's a sad day for the 'net I tell you.
for prospective employers to beat you with. When a cv comes in, do a Google for the person's name, check them out, their hobbies, their faith, their habits..... Result: Interviewer knows more about the interviewee than the interviewee knows about the company.
I think personal websites are cool back in the day when... well, HTML isn't so complicated, and the average website is a few tables with a few pictures.
now, if you would just look at the mountains of shit you'd have to sift through to make a site (try webmonkey.com), it's unreal! Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.
And what I mean by respectable is that - on average, websites have became much more feature rich, the graphics much better, the content more frequently updated, etc. That little website you used to use as a homepage that's hacked up in an afternoon looks by today's standards simply pathetic - and people know this. They fudge around with building a site and then find out, man this is a lot of work and not worth it.
Besides, there are millions of places online where you can do exactly what you would have be doing on your own site anyway - I keep my journal on slashdot; I get a whole comment feedback system without having had to muck with CGI code / HTML / site design / debugging / server troubleshooting, and so on. Now, eventually I would like to port it to something myself just to have a little more control over it, but really, even if I think about it now, it's not worth the trouble - and keeping a blog online would be exactly the same thing I'd be doing if I had my website, so this simply removes a lot of the hassle.
So, similarly as people don't all do the painting / maintenance of their home by themselves, website I think comes the same way - it's the tradeoff between convenience of something prepackaged (weblog sites, say) vs something custom, and the amount of effort needed for that little custom isn't always worthwhile in all cases.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
In the case of PWSs, obviously there is often vanity or some form of craziness, but equally often people use them to keep geographically distant relatives up to date on the growth of children etc., or on whatever activity might be of common interest.
And even in the craziest of implementations, it could be reasonably said that at least it takes a bit more intelligence to design a web page than it does to plunk down $3000 for fancy wheels and tires for a car.
Of course the guy with the car generally gains some ancillary benefits woefully unavailable to the guy who sits in his room coding HTML.
"Damn, Paris, why do you have to stop doing that to answer your cell phone? Get back to work so I can finish my post on Slashdot!"
Personal websites seem to be taking off - as blogs.
Blogs are an interesting thing really - a published diary - in realtime.
I don't really see them as important though. It is like my preference of topic-oriented discussion vs. person-oriented discussion - so it is natural for me to prefer a site dedicated to a certain topic.
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.
I see the personal website as kind of like a mountain of mashed potatoes, except with a set of Three Stooges action figures on the top, and except the potatoes are those weird blue kind so the whole thing looks freaky. And there's, like, some kind of cheerleading squad doing a dance all around, except that the virtual cheerleaders are really monkeys. Evil monkeys, that is, except that they really have hearts of gold once you get to know them! But it's far easier to just put up a website than build a mountain of mashed potatoes!
How can I tell people how wonderful I am if I do not have a personal web site? I think it is wrong to call them 'vanity sites' when I am simply relaying important information about how brilliant I am.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I actually had a discussion about this with one of my friends awhile back. It seemed back around '97 or so you could make a web page, submit it to AltaVista, Infoseek, and HotBot and be almost certain of a steady trickle of hits. For example, my younger brother made a web page about all his pets, and then later added pictures of his wristwatch collection. It used to be just having matching keywords was enough to get your page noticed. Pretty much in the same period of time Google became popular, the hits on his site ground to a halt.
Personal websites are at a disadvantage under Google's Pagerank system. A new page isn't going to have many other pages linking to it, and for the most part, personal webpages won't end up with many other pages linking to them unless the content is very popular. Google has created a kind of catch-22 situation... You have to already be popular to get a good Pageranking. The system is great for indexing an existing web of sites, but poor for allowing new sites to get exposure.
I just remember running into personal webpages far more often back in the days when AltaVista, and Infoseek ruled, before the spam sites started abusing keywords. I'm sure Google didn't intend to turn the Internet into a popularity contest, but it would be interesting if they added user-adjustable features like Slashdot's moderation modifiers so you could give a higher (or lower) bias towards personal webpages.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I originally created my website to share my ideas and opinions on the world, but I realised that there is already too much out there (the blog-boom?) and I didn't need to be an endless source of flames.
Now my site has taken a new edge to it, it no longer related to anybody but those who know me and live around me. Some people would concider my site to be of any marketable or even personal value anymore, but it doesn't matter. The only people who matter are the people who you want it to matter to (seriously, how many of you think that people in a fridge or road cones on buildings matter?).
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.
PaulGraham.Com and Stallman.Org are websites of two well-known individuals in the computing industry. The two websites make very different statements about the respective individuals. Paul Graham's site is neat, and organized. Richard M. Stallman's site has lots of information and links related to his idealogies. Even the choice of the domain name reflects something about their personalities. Paul Graham has chosen a dot com, while Stallman prefers a dot org.
Ummm. Exactaly what does the ending tell about the person? Is Stallman an entire organization? Is Graham a commercial operation? What does a dot net say about me?
But I think many people have missed the point of personal websites. Just because they're on the Word Wide Web it doesn't mean your audience should be everybody in the world. Many people set up websites intended to be viewed by a small group of people (such as family photo albums who nobody but family or close friends would be interested in).
Also, how many people who design websites for a living today started off by knocking up a basic website? Most likely it was the equivalent of a "Hello World!" example, and the most readily available content was most likely all about you. Now, unless you were particularly eccentric its unlikely you ever intended this to be seen by thousands of people, but it was still a necessary stage in your learning process.
So stop being website snobs - there's enough room on the net for everyone!
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Just as there were tedious people writing cruddy webpages there are tedious people writing drivel in their blogs. At least their godawful webpages tended not to clog up google so badly.
;-)
A semi-static[0] personal web page, if written correctly, provides the best solution. It can include everything people might want to know about you, including your opinions and views; it's low-maintenance (you only need add articles every now and again, when there is important stuff that needs adding) and people are far more likely to read one or two thoughtful, well-written[1] articles written on such a site than the reams of semi-literate journal entries most blogs seem to consist of.
As you might guess, I'm not the world's biggest blog fan
[0] Updated, but only infrequently and with important stuff, not how you're pissed at rasterman today because enlightenment crashed on you.
[1] If you only add an article every now and then you can afford to spend some time and write it well.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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
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 paraphrase.
The vast majority of personal websites suck. This is a fact. The ones that don't suck are really only useful to a handful of people.
When was the last time you wandered through Google results for "personal website"? If I had to venture a guess, not until you clicked through to that link. Yet when was the last time you visited someone's personal website? Again, this is only a guess, but probably within the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This is because the content on that site was, at some point, useful to you-- even if you were the one who created it.
I use my personal website (here, if you dare) primarily as a collection of links that I use daily and also as a way to get my PHP and HTML work out there, on exhibit. I have, probably, ten consistent viewers world-wide. Three of them are my mom, dad, and sister. And this is fine for me! Because I know that the content on my site (with the exception of maybe one or two areas explicitly for display) is of relevance to absolutely nobody.
People here are talking about how in the old days of the Internet (which can't be that damned old if I remember them), personal websites contained a diverse variety of information on just about anything, and that these websites formed the backbone of how people did research; some scientist in Alameda's paper on nuclear vessels, posted on his website, was just as valuable as, say, a fan-page devoted to Evangelion by some kid from Buffalo. Nowadays, everything has a website. You can get any information you want about anything straight from the manufacturer, and personal sites be damned; they're only opinions.
Both points are valid. In the "old days" the information you got was still people's opinions, which meant you had to find three or four correlating opinions before you could really judge. Now, personal websites allow us to cut through marketing and P.R. bullcrap, but we still need three or four correlating opinions before we can really judge.
I'm straying from my point. Does anyone here follow anime? Stupid question, right? How do you learn about new releases in Japan? Sure, if you know Japanese, you can check out TV Tokyo or TBS's websites and get the info from them. But odds are you don't (and this is not a slander against those of you who do-- statistically, however, you're in the minority, OK?). So how would you know about releases like (and I'm dating myself here, as the only reference I have handy is a copy of Newtype that's about three months old*) Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Scrapped Princess, or Sora no Stellvia? Personal sites do allow "niche" sectors like anime (ha ha) and, I dunno, latex doll painters a way to spread information. The personal site is the next step in "word of mouth".
(* Newtype USA is only a year old. Hardly enough basis to say that anime is mainstream now; but that's not what's at issue here. You could just as easily do a google search on latex doll painters and find out more than you ever wanted to know. The point is that Newtype is only one source of information. The internet, and personal websites, provide about fifty zillion other points of view.)
Just to state it clearly here: Less need for personal websites != no need for personal websites.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
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!!!
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.
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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
What is weird is visiting the web site of someone who has died. Often, their ISP leaves their sites up for years later. It seems strange and sad to learn about their family, pets, sporting activities and plans when you know how things turned out in the end. I believe people often think they will live longer than they do. And I think of the time wasted putting these sites together when they could have been spending the time enjoying themselves in the pub! Nobody ever said on there death bed 'gosh, I wish I'd used a different background for my personal web site'.
I stole this
Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.
This is not necessarily true. In fact, some of the best personal websites I've bookmarked don't use tables, PHP, CGI or any of that. But I've bookmarked them because they've got really good content on them.
I've been trying to come up with a format to create my own personal site for a while now, and have found that the single best site-style that I enjoy reading is just text with some pictures in the middle of it. That's it. No styles, no fonts, nada. I like that when I resize my browser window the text gets reformatted. I like that I'm not constrained by some asinine user interface that's impossibly artistic at the cost of usability.
There's a reason that newspapers (for example) have the consistant layout that they do. The evolution of columns and font sizes have resulted in a generalized format that is not only easy to read, but over time has become accepted. Once people accept a certain way of doing something, it becomes the best way by merit of its ubiquitousness alone. Ir's the same reason why KDE and Gnome mimic the "START" button. You don't have to reinvent the wheel for your personal website just because some assclown says you have to use every technology available for your site to be good. The key is to just get started. Write some stuff down, upload some pictures... the site will grow over time and the "best" layout and tools will make themselves known.
..said we could all be famous for 15 minutes.
In the web era that translates to: we can all be famous for 15 people.
Indeed, that's about as many as look at my personal web site (www.mvw.net), and I am happy with that. I get to hone my web design and sysadmin skills, my mother gets to see what I am up to, and a few people like to engage in debate which is fine.
And the most important : old friends can find me! My name comes up very early in Google as a result of the personal web sites. Web sites are a bit like business cards in that respect - people don't look at them in a lot of detail but without them you're lost.
Michael
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
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
I've had my own website for a few years now. I loved posting little stories about myself and keeping in touch with some old friends back home. I was pretty comfortable posting just about anything because I was certain that only a few people where reading the site, and that I knew who they where.
So one day I put up a post where I reminisced about my high school days (Over 15 Years ago), and I mentioned my first crush and how she shot me down. Mentioning her by first name only.
A few hours later I got an e-mail. From Her!. Asking me to remove the post from my website. 15 years, after my last contact with her and I get an email from her almost immediately after submitting a post with her first name. I guess the thought of her name associated with mine is to much to bear.
Anyways, now the only thing on my site is the local temperature.
Favorite line from the article: "It is much harder to fool people with a website." If only that were true.
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.
I am somewhat concerned about privacy with my own web site, but here are a few things you can do to help:
1. Don't post personal information/your address.
2. Use a script (if you can) for e-mail instead of posting your e-mail address. Then you can choose who has your address and who doesn't. example
3. Use WHOIS protection services like those offered by RegisterFly and Go Daddy. RegisterFly only charges $2.50/year for this protection.
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 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!
Congradulations, CowboyNeal. You win the first anual Autopr0n.com torturued Analogy award. To wit, WTF?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I figure if I work hard enough, I will get paid to do what I love.
Keep dreaming - I've been beating off for decades and haven't made dime one from it.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
Though in a little bit of self-depreceation I even posted my first website on the web again (this time under my personal domain), you can see it here in all it's Strongbad glory, though Strongbad wasn't around, when I posted the first version of it on the net. In fact nor was Google.
Many personal sites have potential.
Also, fan sites sometimes have unique perspectives or pictures. Most fan sites are personal sites.
My brother uses his personal site to display pics of his daughter, which otherwise, I'd never see.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
If someone's personal homepage mentions a certain hobby in detail, chances are other people will pick up on it and visit that website to see someone else's experience.
I love the homegrown websites about hobbies and cool stuff. It's the corporate websites that have choked the life out of the Internet by making giant sites that cover everything mildly, so I can never find the real content -- from the people!
Okay, it's been a good morning. My site usually gets 20 unique hits per day but in the 6 hours since I posted that comment, I've received 586 unique hits.
All times are GMT:
I posted my first comment at 10:46
11:00 -> 12:00 : 51 hits
12:00 -> 13:00 : 86 hits
13:00 -> 14:00 : 172 hits
14:00 -> 15:00 : 174 hits
15:00 -> 16:00 : 64 hits
16:00 -> 16:48 : 33 hits
My comment started at score:2 because I have Excellent karma. It was quickly modded Flamebait, but this had no noticeble affect on hits. It was then modded repeatedly and waivered between score:2 and score:4, always "Funny". I think the surge of hits i received from 13:00 -> 15:00GMT was from America waking up and this this story being near the top of the slashdot front page. Hit are slowing now, I suppose fewer new people are reading the story. In total, my post was modded Funny at least 8 times, Overrated at least 4 times, and Flamebait at least 3 times.
My confession is that the first "Anonymous Coward" that replied to my post was in fact me. After my post was modded flamebait, I thought I'd try social engineering. Could I make people think my post was funny simply by saying so? It appears the answer is yes. (or maybe my post really was funny.) Note that I don't have any ads on my page, so hits were not getting me cash or anything.
All very interesting to me.
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"Why Personal Websites Matter"
:)
Because the best pr0n pages ARE personal websites
____
nico
Nico-Live
Sure, there are lots of details you don't need to and shouldn't bring up, but leaving out all personal details from your CV and not discussing it where it would be natural during job interviews will just make you seem cold, anti-social and unfriendly.
Pure skills are rarely the most important aspect of a prospective employee - someone that don't fit into the team may end up being a liability regardless of skill level.
In past jobs I've turned away plenty of candidates that had great skills because it was obvious that they would be a bad fit with the rest of the team, and several times hired people that were weaker technically.
Sure, if your interests are just plain weird, don't start talking about them (unless they're weird in a way that you think the interviewers will find cool and interesting), but if you're active in sports (especially teams) or participate in uncontroversial organizations (in other words, if you're a member of the local chess club, a drama group, book group or similar, cool, but if you're a member of a political party or a political pressure group, be VERY careful, even if you think the interviewer sympathise with your views), or play an instrument, or work with animals in your spare time, etc. etc. you a) may be lucky and find something the interviewer is interested in, and b) might show skills or personality traits that the interviewer will think fits well in the team.
That doesn't mean you should start blabbering about it unless it comes naturally, but if you're asked about organizational skills, and you haven't managed any team at work, but have organized camping trips for homeless children, or spent your spare time on some other challenging tasks that require the same skill set they have asked for, many interviewers will like that you think outside the box, that you've done something socially worthwhile that also demonstrate the skills they asked about, and that you are open about what you do.
If you do bring up your personal life though, make sure that you point out how it relates to the position unless it is blindingly obvious - the person interviewing you might not know what is involved in your specific hobbies or social activities.
I'd say they were looking at your pic to know who to beat up. Emacs? *Everyone* knows that vi is the one true editor :)
/. Of course, I rarely get modded, either.
I've never noticed a traffic spike when I post on
I also just realized I never visited your main site page, just the links you provided...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
The point being that personal sites are going to start mattering more than they have in the past.
/charles