I'm stuck at a crossroads between what to do with my own. Not sure if I want to make it more of a documentation/wiki style site for everything I'm interested in or if I want to treat it more like a blog. I've got it hooked up to ActivityPub now and I'm intrigued by the possibilities that brings to the table, but I don't think I'd want it to replace my Mastodon account, which puts it in a weird sort of limbo.
So I want to know, what do you use your own website for?
I guess this depends largely on what you do for a living. I use mine as a personal portfolio. It allows me to create galleries of work that can't be made public. I can also create a new gallery with specific curated content if I need to for a specific job application. I also host my CV and some basic info in my About page. I could blog on it too but I'm not a blog type of person.
+1 here, just a personal portfolio for my books. Or what I call a "site vitrine" in French (showcase website) so it is a very simple mostly static website.
A friend gave me the best career advice years ago: make a personal portfolio site.
He said nobody really reads through resumes anymore. A portfolio with lots of screenshots or photos, and a very short paragraph works best. Also tack on a resume for those who ask for it.
Organized by category, date, or whatever makes sense. You can use a blogging engine like Wordpress, or a static hosting platform like Jeckyll or Hugo. Assign it a simple domain (like .work or .portfolio). Keep it updated with latest clippings.
Then whenver someone asks, just point them at the site. Print it on a biz card, make custom stickers, etc.
If you want free hosting, check out Github Pages.
Mine mostly exists as a statement that I exist. It was supposed to be a blog and contact page but I never actually write anything for the blog and nobody ever tries to contact me except for spam.
I used it as a way to share very limited interesting events with family and friends. Instead of posting to Facebook, I would post maybe a half dozen blog/photo updates a year. Those that asked and really wanted to know what I was up to could go look at it.
90% of my views came from some dude in Japan who thought I was beautiful. I'm no newb to the internet so the only photos of me were at a distance and while I was wearing hats and sunglasses. I had no identifying information on there, but didn't trust all my friends and family not to put something in the comments. So I pulled it down.
BlueAitoKan77, I'm sure you were beautiful too but no thank you. (Not their actual handle, obfuscated some for their privacy)
That's crazy. 90% of views from a single person. How often does this happen usually?
It was just a website meant for friends and families so view count was always going to be super low. He would view each post several times and comment on almost all of them multiple times over the course of months, so I could tell he was going back to my site again and again.
I've never had that happen before or since, but nor have I tried!
Just basic information about myself and maybe a thing or two I've done on the Internet.
Someday if I get the time or the server resources, I'd add subdomains to it to host other stuff, for example "lemmy.example.com", while "example.com" would just be the basic information, and probably a directory to all the other subdomain stuff.
It’s a basic about me type thing with links to all my stuff and a contact form (which invokes my self hosted and homemade email sending API). It also has Prometheus metrics which I consume on my “global overview” dashboard (everything happening with all my stuff at once) so I know if somebody has visited. Pretty cosy.
I actually just got started yesterday. And by "started" I mean, I'm currently creating a graphic to help explain our students at work a specific concept and if that's online, I'm done with it for the moment. If I find more concepts that could use a graphic, I'll obviously add more, though.
I plan to just throw it up on Codeberg Pages or Neocities or something.
