The easiest way to find out when a professor got tenure is to look at the last time they did a major update to their website. The last papers they decided to put up there are from 2014 and then they simply linked to a Google Scholar? This is a very strong predictor.
>I have a project in Things called "Blog post ideas" where I maintain an ever-growing list of topics to write about.<p>I've such a list. Currently at ~10K entries. At such high number it's actually counter productive as choosing from abundance of options requires more effort. The popularized term for this is paradox of choice. I wonder how M. Richard does it (<a href="https://matt-rickard.com/archive" rel="nofollow">https://matt-rickard.com/archive</a>) and has written a single post every day for the past one-two years. Leaves me really impressed.
Once upon a time, I was young and foolish. When I came upon a topic, and if I could not find an answer on the first page of Google, I just wrote it out. There we go, one blog post. Blogs were new, and my few friends would swarm in, email/forward, and tell the others on other forums. It would suddenly be popular, shared, commented on, and debated.<p>Someone would ask a question on a forum or a mailing list. I would then blog out that answer and keep sharing it repeatedly to the same questions asked over and over again. The blog post would then be linked and discussed by sites such as Adobe, etc. Bam, you feel like writing more.<p>Now, I have a query or a topic, and there are hundreds of answers that people have already written about. Or I will know that is stupid; I need more information and in-depth research -- then I would get lazy and focus elsewhere.<p>Finally, I'm beginning to get addicted to the quiet and loving the new intoxication of silence.<p>Offtopic: The website's design is brilliant. Is this a theme or custom-rolled? A quick source did not reveal much but I would really love to steal a design similar to this that I can adopt.
Turn it in to your personal wiki instead of blog. The difference being making it hierarchical and making edits inline. And then write your work notes, thoughts on it.<p>No one might read it, but it's primarily for your own reference.
We're building montaigne.io to directly tackle the 'Updating and deploying takes too long' and 'Too hard to add and edit content' issues. montaigne.io allows users to create, edit and publish a website without ever having to leave Apple Notes.<p>From personal experience, using Apple Notes as the sole interface to my personal site has resulted in new, unexpected behaviour. I publish shorter items, more often.
I do contracts and have a sort of 'CV' site with examples of my work. It's a readme.md in an otherwise empty public git repo.
It's like that cus I will actually update it, as updating involves just changing a text file and git pushing.<p>Also I think of it as a filter, if a client is superficial enough to not like me cus my CV site is not pretty, then good, I probably dont want to work for them.
I started in 2006, with a self hosted picture-a-day photoblog. It is nice to publish a photo instead of it just living on a hard drive.<p>Biggest source of traffic is probably my mom. I don't care, it's my living diary.
None of these ring true.<p>The actual reasons: lack of purpose and strategy, combined with permanent record.<p>A resource is only worth as much as it is requested. No readers? No updates. A personal website: if you are not looking for a job, you won't update it. A blog: if you have nowhere to passively promo your website (no twitter followers, no youtube subscribers, no newsletter readers, and you are not otherwise famous) then you must either actively promote it on HN/Reddit (takes a certain mindset) or again you won't update it (a strategy where you write first and then promote might help but target payoff must be so good to outweigh that, and again certain mindset).<p>You'd ask why not just practice around, write stuff knowing no one will read it? Permanent record. Screw up once on your personal domain and 98% of the time it's OK but 2% that's it for life.
I began developing personal websites in 2001. It all began with <FONT SIZE="7" COLOR="RED">Hello!</FONT>. It was a time when people like me would develop personal websites just because we could. It didn't matter whether we had something useful to say or if anyone visited the website. All that mattered was that it was fun! I still maintain my personal website in the same spirit.<p>I do share the technical posts from my websites on HN and Reddit hoping to get some feedback but that's not the primary motive. Also, there were no HN and Reddit in 2001. Back then I used to write for myself and I still do so now. My personal website is a way for me to keep an archive of some fun things I know so that my future self can look back at them when needed or desired. Only a few days ago, I added a jokes page[1] to my website just because I thought it would be nice to keep my favourite jokes somewhere easily accessible.<p>As years go by, I've found that the friction of editing and publishing new posts or pages to my website has only become less. First came virtual private servers that swayed me away from shared web hosting services. Good riddance because the shared web hosts often had terrible security. Then came Git which made it incredibly efficient and convenient to keep a change history of my website and sync it to any system.<p>I write my pages in plain HTML using Emacs. Then git add; git commit; make pub[2] and the updated website is published within seconds. A Common Lisp program reads all my HTML pages, adds a common theme and template to them and writes them out to a directory Nginx can read from. It is as low friction as it can get while maintaining complete control on the design and code of the website.<p>It has been 13 years since I wrote the first line of HTML and I am still having fun!<p>[1] <a href="https://susam.net/maze/jokes.html" rel="nofollow">https://susam.net/maze/jokes.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile#L144" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile#L144</a>
One easy way to generate some content for a blog, if you're a techie who participates actively in tech communities like, well, Quora or Reddit or FB or... or this place*... is to keep your comments.<p>If you put in some effort and write something a few paragraphs long, or that took some research, or where you realised you had knowledge other commenters didn't, copy-and-paste it into the blog.<p>It's kept mine going for years. I write for a living; I rarely have time or inclination to do more for free. So, repurposed anonymised comments it is. Keeps it active and I have a few readers.<p>-----<p>* _One night in Bangkok_ reference
I find the hardest thing is having something deep enough that I'd want to write about it, and feel that it'd be useful to refer to in the future or for others to read.<p>Normally I do it alongside FOSS contributions, etc. - but with a full-time job, that's much less frequent than I'd like.<p>There's been times where it's been very useful though, both for my own reference and to show others e.g. on stuff that I did in my PhD ~10 years ago.
I blog for myself. My rule is pure technical "how I did stuff" content. Which is just my own memos on things it's useful to know from job to job.<p>The big change for me was making the effort easy - Nikola to generate static content and push to Github Pages is about as low effort as it gets, since jupyterlab completely solves the "markdown with drag and drop pictures" problem and Nikola can take that and just publish it.
The only reason I made a blog and a post was because it was something to learn with and get some of that sweet sweet Hacker News front page traffic. It did work by the way.
The issue is the purpose of a personal website.<p>- it's domain is like a home address on the internet, the website is the home on the web BUT we normally do not do much on our homes to show things to others, they tend to be used just internally showing nothing particular to the outside world;<p>- using it to share some personal projects it's ok-ish in the sense that if the project grow it probably get a project website, if not is probably not much interesting for others being almost unreachable due to the lack of really effective semantic search engines;<p>- using it to publish CVs and alike is ok-ish since such publications can't be targeted so they are a bit too generic to be of effective usage;<p>- using it to publish personal articles is ok, but normally no one except professional journalists have something to publish regularly.<p>IMVHO <i>real</i> personal websites:<p>- MUST NOT be blogs, blog idea IMO was a tentative to milk more personal information in the early stage of surveillance capitalism before smartphones came out using the peoples desire to show themselves to the world not caring much if the world is interested or not;<p>- they should be REALLY personal, in the sense hosted on a homeserver because in 2022 ANY home should have an internet connection and any user a domain name so a static IP and a bunch of domains with vhosts for any family members for email, IM, file sharing, ... AND personal website as a way to publish something you like to share casually;<p>- RSS to offer a mean for friends to follow the site without manually visiting it (full articles in the feed);<p>- a personal web-app for file-sharing and things you like when on the go.<p>These are my only personal list of reasons to have, and so to keep a bit up to date, a personal website. Stating clearly that personal website does not mean blog.