What a personal site is for
Not a résumé and not a portfolio. A place to think in public, slowly.
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A personal site is the one place on the web where nobody else sets the rules. No feed, no algorithm, no character limit. That freedom is also why most of them sit empty: with no constraints, it is hard to know what to put there.
The trick I have settled on is to treat it like a journal that happens to be public. Not everything from the journal goes up, but what does go up keeps the journal’s shape: short, dated, written to work something out rather than to announce it.
What goes in
- Things I had to figure out the hard way, written down while I still remember what was confusing.
- Notes on books, when a book changed how I think about something I do.
- The occasional longer piece, when a note refuses to stay short.
What stays out
Anything I would not still stand behind in a year. Announcements. Anything that is really just a link to somewhere else.
Write the note you wish you had found.
That is the whole editorial policy.