Even in Kyoto

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 Faq-o-matic is an awesome little tiny content management system that's totally out of date and under appreciated.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.