Reasons you aren't updating your personal site (2020)

• susam.net

  6 32 9.0 Common Lisp

  Source code of https://susam.net/

I began developing personal websites in 2001. 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 website in the same spirit.

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.

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 solutions. Then came Git which made it incredibly efficient and convenient to keep a change history of my website and sync it to any system. I write my pages in plan 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 that suits my taste and preferences while maintaining complete flexibility on the website.

It has been 13 years since I wrote my first "Hello!" and while HTML and web development and publishing has evolved a lot since then, I am still having fun!

[1] https://susam.net/maze/jokes.html

[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile#L144

• blog.johnnyreilly.com

  22 34 9.5 TypeScript

  This is the source code for https://johnnyreilly.com

I can only speak for my own experience. I blog because I enjoy it and because it helps me stop repeatedly solving the same problems. It's essentially my long term memory published to a website. If it was only that and no-one read it, that would be fine. It has been going for more than 10 years now and I have no plans to stop.

TBH I only really started looking at traffic in the last year and I'm gratified it gets a bunch. But honestly not for the topics I would imagine (and often hope for). It makes me happy - I'm going to keep going.

https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/

• SurveyJS

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• texme

  13 2,255 0.0 JavaScript

  Self-rendering Markdown + LaTeX documents

This is nice. We are website-mates. My website is also 2001-2022. I like the simple and serif font on your website.

I had thrown in your https://github.com/susam/texme few times to quickly send Markdown files for reading. :-)

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