The importance of personal webspace
I’ve just came across this article Into the personal-website-verse. It made a few points along with my comments:
- Popular websites use algorithm to predict what the users want to see, and it promotes content that will generate the most “like, share and click”, which in turn generates revenue via advertisement. Hence users have little control over what they wanted to see. This echoes with my experience on YouTube, where my front page is full of stuff I’m not interested in, and the channels I subscribed to rarely pops up on top. Similarly, the Amazon product recommendation algorithm has a problem of listing stuff that you’ve already bought. As a content producer, the consequence of this is your work are less likely to be noted on those platforms.
- Another problem is the longevity of your data. Companies come and go (site-deaths), often taking content offline with them. They could also start adding paywalls to your content as they wish.
- If you’re a developer, you could experiment with all the new techs on your own site as well. Although, nowadays I would like to keep things as simple as possible. I find it hard to concentrate to write when there’s a toy that I could constantly play with.
- The core of web is hyperlinks. We should “quote people and link to other sites” whenever possible. It is what holds the web together. Some of the retro ways on linking include blogroll and webrings. There are also technologies such as webmention and microformats to help with this.
- It’s okay to start out simple. I am currently using a pre-built theme for this site, and I am very tempted to try designing my own site with pure HTML and CSS with a retro design flavour.