Decisions, decisions...

[rebeccmeister]

The more I keep thinking about it, the more I want to create a bare-bones website for myself. The hard decision is, hosting. One logical choice would be to go with slowass.net, similar to scrottie's old personal site. If I can get him to help me decide on a simple ftping method to use. The last site I put together was back in 2002, after I took an intro to computer science class. That one had a good run - you can still see photos of my kitty as a kitten on there, yay. I still like it, but I don't want to have to move it around too much more, so I don't want it to be tied to a university. I also don't think I want Google to run it. Sorry, Google, I just don't trust you to leave me be with my old-skool html. And honestly, I could see slowass.net going two ways: just fine, or with me feeling like I don't have control over what I'm doing, which would defeat the purpose of the site. (In contrast, I still feel reasonably in control on Livejournal, despite the miscellaneous administrative changes that have been made over my years of blogging. Journal posts just won't provide the organizational system I'm hoping for.)

And so, I haven't settled on anything, yet. Don't expect anything all that exciting; it will mostly be a collection of lists that are relevant to me, plus a calendar. Plus maybe some research tools and info, and some recipes. All of the stuff that I'd like to be able to access remotely, at any time.

Comments

[scrottie.livejournal.com]

People do judge you by your URL. I'm sure someone has written a "what your URL says about you" article. Having your resume at an AOL address will do a pretty good job of keeping you from getting interviewed at a lot of places, not that you were ever considering that option. Really, the best place "to be seen" is your university's public web pool. It's usually extremely restrictive and they usually want money to keep your account open after you leave, but it's also probably worth it. In the old days, they would forward email and links for you as a courtesy. The loss of this brought down havoc on the academic self-publishing world.

A vanity domain is another option. This has the advantage of being able to re-point it to different hosts as your hosting changes, though some outfits, such as Universities, don't support associating your content with your domain name. If your name (first and last, run together or with a -) is available, you should buy that. joker.com and a lot of places provide this for about $10/year.

CSS (newer Web standard) makes it easier to maintain good looking pages by hand, with a text editor, since the clutter of stuff related to prettying it up is removed from the document.

Blogs are restrictive but this sort of restrictiveness is generally helpful. People tend to update and post more when freed from concerns about how to structure a site, and a flow of content is more important than anything else. You can always insert static links to a resume or bio. Some blogging software knows how to publish static files to another server, such as a University web pool.

It may be the case though that this just doesn't fit well with what you're trying to do. Faq-o-matic is an awesome little tiny content management system that's totally out of date and under appreciated. That's another option. Making a Wiki for yourself is probably too vain.

I haven't really found the perfect platform for this sort of random self publishing either. It seems like it would be editing text in a word processor, saving it online, and then having a templating system pick it up and add the site headers/fooders/navigation to it. Actually, that's exactly what we did at Mayo and it worked fantastically well. Perhaps the closest thing to that in this modern era would be to customize bloxsum to look nice, but that requires CGI access on the server.

The most common mistake people make when setting anything up on the web is wanting to try to impress their viewers. It won't happen. I guess my slowass.net page is kind of a joke on that idea.

I would still argue for the 24/7 live video stream of fungus, though.

This has been on my mind since use.perl.org got locked down. I have a place to dump stuff, but no longer a place to just write about technical stuff. I got hooked on having a readership of my own. That incentive to write is what made it interesting.

[scrottie.livejournal.com]

Oh, one other thought. Finding the environment you like might be a matter of trying various things.

Okay, another thought. In the old days of departmental Unix servers, the web server and the machine hosting the research and email and so on were often one and the same, or else part of the same cluster sharing files. A lot of people would just do this thing where they'd throw files they wanted to share into a certain directory, or directories under that directory. Some of them had index.html files that would get displayed and linked to stuff in there or other directories, others were just plain directory listings. This was a fantastic system for making it easy to share and publish stuff. I'd like to see some modern counterpart to that, where you could right-click files on your laptop and click "publish" to have them, and changes to them, appear online, perhaps after first telling the machine what folder to put it in. dropbox (.com) kinda does something like this, giving you a remote-mounted virtual harddrive you can drop things in to share between computers or publicly, but it doesn't yet do anything helpful for turning the content into a site or, as far as I know, let you use your own domain to point to your content.

Hope this mess of randomness is somehow helpful.

[scrottie.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. Apple has this ".mac" service too. I haven't used it but I've seen several examples of relatively non-technical users creating nice online little environments (with calendars and files and blogs) with it.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Awesome Undergrad 2 was suggesting looking into dropbox for lab purposes, coincidentally. I'll add it to my to-do list.

And actually, I think the thing I'm looking for is close to what you're describing for departmental Unix servers. I miss the days of logging in to the ASU Unix server. It was my friend; it ran my SAS scripts.