The Changing Personal web site
The always interesting Jeffrey Zeldman has a post reflecting on the role of personal web sites. As people start to use web services such as linkedin, flickr, and facebook, there’s less actual content to put on a personal site. He offers one neat example of Jody Ferry, where the entire site is nothing more than a link out to various web services. It is not such a bad thing that the traditional static personal web site go away. The ones I have had, and most others I see, are mostly dusty collections of old stuff. They don’t tell visitors much about what you are doing or thinking about in the present, and as such aren’t really very useful.
I find the personal blog-type site to be a much more positive experience for myself. The format focuses on what I’m doing now. And as long as I find time to add a new post at least once a week, I’m keeping it current. I don’t know that I’m quite ready to off-load all my content to external services, such as in the Jody Ferry example. But I’ve already got some of that going on, with pages such as my photos page. The images display here, but they’re really on flickr. I guess I prefer to keep the display of the content all together here, even if the content itself comes from a range of external locations.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site
Jody Ferry - Interactive Art Direction & User Experience Design
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