I’m stuck at a crossroads between what to do with my own. Not sure if I want to make it more of a documentation/wiki style site for everything I’m interested in or if I want to treat it more like a blog. I’ve got it hooked up to ActivityPub now and I’m intrigued by the possibilities that brings to the table, but I don’t think I’d want it to replace my Mastodon account, which puts it in a weird sort of limbo.
So I want to know, what do you use your own website for?
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I guess this depends largely on what you do for a living. I use mine as a personal portfolio. It allows me to create galleries of work that can’t be made public. I can also create a new gallery with specific curated content if I need to for a specific job application. I also host my CV and some basic info in my About page. I could blog on it too but I’m not a blog type of person.
A friend gave me the best career advice years ago: make a personal portfolio site.
He said nobody really reads through resumes anymore. A portfolio with lots of screenshots or photos, and a very short paragraph works best. Also tack on a resume for those who ask for it.
Organized by category, date, or whatever makes sense. You can use a blogging engine like Wordpress, or a static hosting platform like Jeckyll or Hugo. Assign it a simple domain (like .work or .portfolio). Keep it updated with latest clippings.
Then whenver someone asks, just point them at the site. Print it on a biz card, make custom stickers, etc.
If you want free hosting, check out Github Pages.
My website is just
cowsayquotingfortune, decorated withlolcatand converted to HTML withaha.It’s literally a bash script.
I used it as a way to share very limited interesting events with family and friends. Instead of posting to Facebook, I would post maybe a half dozen blog/photo updates a year. Those that asked and really wanted to know what I was up to could go look at it.
90% of my views came from some dude in Japan who thought I was beautiful. I’m no newb to the internet so the only photos of me were at a distance and while I was wearing hats and sunglasses. I had no identifying information on there, but didn’t trust all my friends and family not to put something in the comments. So I pulled it down.
BlueAitoKan77, I’m sure you were beautiful too but no thank you. (Not their actual handle, obfuscated some for their privacy)
That’s crazy. 90% of views from a single person. How often does this happen usually?
It was just a website meant for friends and families so view count was always going to be super low. He would view each post several times and comment on almost all of them multiple times over the course of months, so I could tell he was going back to my site again and again.
I’ve never had that happen before or since, but nor have I tried!
You can have several for different purposes and audiences.
I’ve not got anything online yet, but Andy Matuschak’s framing of “working with the garage door up” has been pretty influential on how I think about this. Matuschak’s approach is also interesting because he has a regular website, but the page I’ve linked is on his notes subsection.
Why not have subdomains, tailored to specific use? And there’s nothing stopping your from cross-referring to them.
Mine mostly exists as a statement that I exist. It was supposed to be a blog and contact page but I never actually write anything for the blog and nobody ever tries to contact me except for spam.
Mine is a collection of notes that I want to reference later. Sometimes I share a link with someone who is interested in the same topic.
The front couple of pages have my social media biography and a link to my public resume. Stuff that looks good if a potential employer searches for my name.
The rest is poorly organized notes for my own future reference. Admittedly, “I wrote a blog article on that. I’ll send you the link.” is a common phrase I utter, to friends, in person. I never check back if they read it. Once in an incredibly long time someone later tells me it was pretty helpful.
I did setup a bot to automatically post links onto my existing Mastodon account, from my RSS feed. I’ve gotten occasional positive feedback on Mastodon, for doing so.
Mine is a front end for hosted services. Nextcloud, jitsi, and the like.
I actually just got started yesterday. And by “started” I mean, I’m currently creating a graphic to help explain our students at work a specific concept and if that’s online, I’m done with it for the moment. If I find more concepts that could use a graphic, I’ll obviously add more, though.
I plan to just throw it up on Codeberg Pages or Neocities or something.
Mine points to a Tumblr blog that I don’t really use anymore because I’m posting here instead. I ought to turn it into a more professional portfolio page and use some of the other ideas in this thread. I have email at that domain thanks to my legacy free Google Workspace I’ve had for like 15 years.
Mine is a blog with 0 posts. I want to share but I don’t have anything to share. The projects that I don’t aren’t anything impressive and I don’t take any photos or document my chaotic process.
I’m pretty shit at writing so I feel like I have to have some interesting content. The target audience is me in the future so idk why am so hesitant to post something.
I use my domain for two purposes:
- I host my own NextCloud instance, so that I don’t have to put my data on someone else’s computer.
- I have a blog (WordPress) with less that a dozen posts. Just random stuff that interested me and I got myself to actually write up.
It’s a basic about me type thing with links to all my stuff and a contact form (which invokes my self hosted and homemade email sending API). It also has Prometheus metrics which I consume on my “global overview” dashboard (everything happening with all my stuff at once) so I know if somebody has visited. Pretty cosy.
