A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?"
The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content that you put up. Nowadays, if you're unlucky and you have a name that's somewhat common, or even just a single other person exists with a strong online footprint that has the same name as you, then you won't even rank for your own name any more. If you want any of your actual content to rank, then the chances of making that happen are even slimmer.
More eyeballs on the internet means greater incentives to put content online that will get noticed, which means that commercial interests will throw money and resources at making that happen which a personal side project can't compete with. More content online means search engines get to be pickier about what they show to users. The cost/benefit calculation has changed dramatically, especially around how much content you have to put up and how frequently you have to put up content, because search engines heavily penalize content for being old or stale even when content ages well when it's good and even when you actually write on stuff that you are a real authority on and even when the web is desperately in need of less of the "sponsored" kind of content and more of the "independent & authoritative" kind of content.
So in order to truly solve the problem of making it worthwhile again for people to have personal websites, one first needs to solve the discovery problem.
I think somebody should invent a search engine to do that.
I think that when people put up personal webpages now, they should adopt a "fediverse" technology stack to turn their personal webpages into a social-media-like experience that allows for an alternative vector of discovery next to keyword search.
I think that policymakers should reverse the current trend wherein they put liabilities on website owners & operators that a private person doing a personal webpage can't possibly shoulder.
So, in conclusion: Bring back some of the goodness of the WWW of 1997 again. I'm all for it. But the technology community has a loooong way to go, before that can become a reality.
I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.
I think that was the core of the "old" 97 websites - I mean Google didn't exist back then, so finding a page when you search for a name was neither here nor there. Instead you found a webpage through word of mouth, and unlike today, you'd sit down and spend the time to have a good browse through the site.
On that last note, personal websites are often still manageable - that is, if you sit down for a couple hours, you can consume a lot of the content that one person created in the span of an X amount of years. Not so much with a lot of the bigger websites nowadays; Medium.com is a rabbithole and you'll quickly end up going to another author's posts. News and moreso social media sites are an infinite torrent of rapid fire blurbs, all tugging you one way then the other in terms of subjects, political sides, and in ways to try and sell something to you.
My own recollection of the pre-Google era of Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc was that search engines already accounted for the lion's share of content discovery online. My gut feeling would be that it might have been even larger back then than it is now, considering the role that social media play nowadays.
What it was like before then I can't say as I'm not that old, but I imagine that URLs would have been made known through the usenet, irc and so on, which were also more multicast/broadcast in nature than word-of-mouth in the sense of people who actually personally know each other in meatspace communicating point-to-point.
> I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.
It depends on what your expectations/goals are. I don't have any expectations to find regular readers or to have XXX monthly users. However, I have the expectation that people will find my blog post if they're looking for a problem which I have solved. I also have the expectation that I can link to my blog post in discussions, so I don't need to repeat myself.
You make it sound like a big audience is the only thing that matters. The linked post talks about a personal website as a digital identity. Giving people a link so they can find you online is a good reason to have a website, even today.
Besides that, making your own website is rewarding in many other ways - Being creative, getting thoughts out of your head, pinning down certain arguments you tend to repeat, etc.
> Giving people a link so they can find you online…
…does not always work. When I give people a link they can't click on, they type it in the search bar. And not even in full, they tend to strip the http://www and .com ends. And you can't click on a piece of paper, which is where my CV typically ends up on.
Last week, I interviewed with someone who said he googled me. All he found was a "little GitHub page". My full name ranks my personal web site first or second on every search engine I've tried, yet he couldn't find it. Is the Google bubble that strong?
Your personal website, btw, is really great, and that interviewer missed out. I program mostly Python in scientific contexts, but it's great to have your perspective on some larger questions of programming style and technology.
When I searched for your name, it came up second in Google, first in DuckDuckGo and first in Bing. Not sure how the interviewer managed to miss it, both the site and your GitHub profile are in the top two results for your name.
The first aspect you mention (handing out a link so people can look it up) is like an online business card that's "free form" in nature. That makes sense if you are a creative professional and the website is a showcase of your creative ability.
But otherwise: If you apply for an job, say in finance, you'll be asked for a resume, because people can't be bothered dealing with information that's extraneous to what goes into a resume.
If you apply for a job as a coder, you'll be asked for a link to a github repo, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your code.
If you apply for a research role, you'll be asked for a link to where your publications can be found, maybe on researchgate, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your peer-reviewed publications.
Do you see the pattern here? It's another example of the balance between information and attention shifting towards too-much-information/too-little-attention. -- And personal webpages aren't good at dealing with the too-little-attention part of the equation, so there is rarely a demand for giving people information about yourself in the "free form" style.
The second aspect you mention: If you produce some webpage content, you can always decide whether you want to see it as a diary and not put it up online, or whether you want to see it as something that should be out in the public, and do put it up online. It seems to me like a contradiction to prefer putting it online, but then not to care about whether it actually gets seen or not. (Especially considering that one gets into a lot of liability everytime one puts something up online).
> If you apply for a job as a coder, you'll be asked for a link to a github repo, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your code.
In my experience, this is not true. I setup a website to describe software projects, and my role in them. It was, per my current boss, a key factor in getting an interview. Browsing github repo's, imo, is much more bothersome than reading a well crafted project page.
...that's a pretty good idea, actually. I'd bet that in some way, shape, or form, search engines probably already have the ability to detect presence of advertising. The question is how they work it into the relevancy formula given that the big two search engines are at the same time the big two ad networks.
I wonder if you can just make an extension to filter these out of the google results. Adblocker extensions certainly don't have a hard time detecting ads in webpages.
That's a great idea! I've been thinking about how it would be possible to classify "personal" sites using a common identifier...lack of ads would be a good one, although that would still grab the majority of corporate blog sites.
That'd certainly be an interesting idea, and it'd probably find quite a few intriguing sites and pages.
That said, it also wouldn't be perfect, since quite a few small and personal sites do have ads for whatever reason. Usually because the author thinks hey, even a 0.5% chance someone clicks on an ad will pay better than no ads/a donation link.
I'd like to point out that all said is not true for small languages. I got a website in Hebrew, and due to the lack of competition I'm #1 on my name, and #1 in many keywords.
The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content that you put up. Nowadays, if you're unlucky and you have a name that's somewhat common, or even just a single other person exists with a strong online footprint that has the same name as you, then you won't even rank for your own name any more. If you want any of your actual content to rank, then the chances of making that happen are even slimmer.
More eyeballs on the internet means greater incentives to put content online that will get noticed, which means that commercial interests will throw money and resources at making that happen which a personal side project can't compete with. More content online means search engines get to be pickier about what they show to users. The cost/benefit calculation has changed dramatically, especially around how much content you have to put up and how frequently you have to put up content, because search engines heavily penalize content for being old or stale even when content ages well when it's good and even when you actually write on stuff that you are a real authority on and even when the web is desperately in need of less of the "sponsored" kind of content and more of the "independent & authoritative" kind of content.
So in order to truly solve the problem of making it worthwhile again for people to have personal websites, one first needs to solve the discovery problem.
I think somebody should invent a search engine to do that.
I think that when people put up personal webpages now, they should adopt a "fediverse" technology stack to turn their personal webpages into a social-media-like experience that allows for an alternative vector of discovery next to keyword search.
I think that policymakers should reverse the current trend wherein they put liabilities on website owners & operators that a private person doing a personal webpage can't possibly shoulder.
So, in conclusion: Bring back some of the goodness of the WWW of 1997 again. I'm all for it. But the technology community has a loooong way to go, before that can become a reality.