Archive for November 16th, 2003

2003.11.16

Personal Websites

With troubles recently regarding material on my site, I’ve decided to start migrating some sections and data to the diary, where they will be away from prying eyes, search engines, and other idiotic things. If you think you need access to the diary, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can do for you.

Though I’d been thinking about this for a while, this article on the relevancy of personal pages, and it’s follow up are really what swayed me. In essence:

- Personal pages are important if you are contributing something; opinions, tutorials, art, writing, etc.

- Personal pages are less relevant when they are too personal; people like their privacy or just feel odd being talked about on a potentially world wide venue. It can/will come back to bite you in the butt.

- Personal pages -if you discuss your personal life too much- can make you seem sad, pathetic, and something of a loser. When I think of the personal pages I goto regularly they rarely make statements about their personal lives except as an aside.

- Don’t let the “personal” aspect fool you; all it means is that the person who maintains the page maintains it on his or her own with little or no help from any corporation, business, or professional occupation. They do it on their own and that they can do it at all shows their skill and determination.

A long time ago I started this up for reasons that soon went south. Learning as I went along, I’ve moved much to the diary to protect it from prying eyes. I’ll just take one step further. It will just take a lot of work restructuring and moving things. Restructuring won’t be fun, but reading old entries to see if they should be moved will be; I don’t go back and read the old stuff very often!

One of the things I liked about the first article was the analogy that the web is shallow. There is so much content out there -most of which is completely useless- it is impossible to know what or where to find the information you want. There are a few “deep pools” in the shallow pond of the web, and these are sites that draw people back again and again.