Why does this website exist?

Published 2020-01-15

It’s a mild allergic reaction to social media. It’s a place to put things I care about. It’s a place to experiment and have fun. It’s a place where I don’t have to worry about likes or whether one or 100 people are looking at what I’m putting out there. It’s in the tradition of putting time into creating a personal website as a creative expression. Remember GeoCities? It’s a modern GeoCities site. It’s Web 1.0. It’s a personal website. The personal website—once abundant and never quite endangered but certainly threatened—is making a comeback. This is my corner of the internet.

It’s inspired by grupstrarules.com, the website of a guy I thought was pretty cool in high school, and bobbyburgess.net/journal, a blog I used to love. All that remains of Bobby Burgess is what can be found on the Wayback Machine, which isn’t much. You got the sense from his blog he had a hard life. I wonder what happened to him.

I also believe it’s in your best interest to control your online brand, no matter who you are. You should determine the first result when someone googles your name, not Facebook or LinkedIn. Don’t give up control of your digital identity.

Or maybe your goal is to be anonymous, so you can publish your thoughts or play with ideas without being linked to your real-life identity. That’s cool too.

About the format of the site

The blog format doesn’t make a lot of sense for reference materials. If I’m looking for instructions on how to install PHP on Ubuntu, I don’t really care when it the article was published relative to the rest of the articles on the site, as long as the information is still relevant.

I would like to know the date it was published on, but it doesn’t make sense to have it buried in a flow along with other possibly related or possibly unrelated items—especially on a personal site like this covering disparate subjects (who besides me is likely to care equally about tips on Vim and sewing a canvas bag?).

I’d rather treat each “post” as a sort of living page within its parent category which can be updated and ammended as needed. I feature these categories on the home page for easy access.

I use the /blog page as a sort of meta log of content updates in other areas of the site.