What should a personal website be?

I was responding to a new email friend today (Project Inbox 2026 is going well, thank you!) in which the subject of trying to make a personal website when your "interests are all over the place" came up.

Which is as good a time as any to write down these thoughts I’ve been germinating for the last decade.

I’ve had this website for a long time and for the first two thirds of that time (as of this writing), I struggled with the question, "What should my website be?"

I didn’t know if I should try to have a professional portfolio and résumé or, later, a blog when that got popular, or just make it a JavaScript-heavy art project to show off my 1337 (wikipedia.org) skillz. I did a little of all of those things.

Sad but true: I put off adding a bunch of things to my site for years because I was obsessing over getting the directory structures "right" the first time.

One day, for whatever reason, I finally stopped worrying and just started putting stuff up and let the organization work itself out as I went. Having "stuff" to work with is important for, as the proverb goes, it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright!

You can see a big jump on the chronological part of the home page starting around 2017 and really taking off in 2018. It gently snowballed from there. (Just counting links doesn’t show the whole picture because some of those links go to big things and some go to small things, but it still gives a general sense.)

That’s 20 YEARS before I became comfortable with the weird hybrid this site is now. It has some chronological "blog-like" elements like an RSS feed, but it also has this huge flat directory of "cards" (you’re reading one now), and deeper sections devoted to particular subjects. The cards, especially, have been incredibly freeing for me to write down ideas without obsessing so much about structure.

Do you need to be an expert to write about things?

I’m not sure I’d call myself an expert on anything. But I believe more strongly now than ever that non-experts should share things.

And I’m still learning that it is seldom too late to start.

In the above card, I make an example of the newest section of this site: Dave’s Cheese Pages.

In those cheese entries, you can see me writing notes for myself and learning in public. I’m not a cheese expert, so who am I to write about cheese? Well, anyone can start reading those entries from the bottom up and learn with me. It’s an ongoing cheese adventure!

My hope is always that because I’m not an expert, I’m not just bringing other people along for the ride, I’m also encouraging other people to be brave, learn in public, and put their own stuff out there on their own personal websites.

It can be in the form of a blog, or long-form articles, or interactive tutorials.

Or just geek out about something you love. Not everything has to aim to teach!

You can do what you would normally do on "social media sites" and follow POSSE ("Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere"). I do a bit of that.

These are all just options.

A personal website should be, above all things, personal. Meaning, its structure and content should reflect what you, as a person, want to put out there. Want to go deep on a topic? Create a deep structure. Want a ton of little topics? Have a shallow structure. I have both.

Putting notes-to-self on your website with things like keyboard shortcuts for your favorite software or famous quotes you don’t want to forget, like a commonplace book (wikipedia.org) can be an amazing resource for yourself. And other people will find it useful too! I use my own site like that all the time. When I can’t remember where I stashed a note, I’ll search for it. Most (all?) of the major search engines let you narrow results to a domain, so I can find my own notes on a topic (e.g. "DWM") from just about any computer in the world by writing my search query like so: site:ratfactor.com dwm or, if I’m being lazy (I’m usually being lazy), just ratfactor dwm. To paraphrase Linus Torvalds, "upload your stuff and let the rest of the world mirror it."

There is no wrong answer. If you want it to be a professional portfolio and résumé, do that. If you want to make fan pages for your favorite book series or music band, do that. If you want to write daily or weekly journal-like entries to get your thoughts out into writing, do that!

And in time, I think you’ll discover what I did: You can actually do all of those things at the same time.

People generally like seeing that other people are well-rounded full-featured humans. (I sure do, perhaps now more than ever!) And if somebody out there doesn’t like your website because you didn’t stick with one format or topic, well, what the heck is their opinion worth, you know what I’m saying?

Keep doing what works. Drop what doesn’t.