A Personal Website Feels Like A Notebook

A personal website is not a very practical object. It needs time. Pages break. Links change. Designs become old. Sometimes you spend an hour changing something that almost nobody will notice.

Still, I like having one. It feels a little like a notebook that happens to be public.

I can write about a technical topic one day and something completely different another day. There is no editor asking whether the subjects match. There is no need to choose one perfect identity. That freedom is probably the main reason I enjoy it.

A website also keeps a strange record of time. When I read something I wrote years ago, I do not only see the words. I remember what I was interested in, what I was learning, and sometimes what I was worried about. Old writing can be uncomfortable.

You notice awkward sentences. You notice opinions that changed. You notice things that once felt important and now feel small.

But maybe that is the point of keeping a record. If everything from the past looks perfect, perhaps we did not change very much.

The web moves quickly. Services appear and disappear. Popular sites change. A personal website feels slower. It sits there and waits for you to return. I like that.

Maybe very few people will ever read some pages. That does not make them useless. Sometimes writing something down is already enough.