Having a personal website

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This page describes my thoughts on having a personal website. Having a personal website is part of maintaining one’s online presence.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Compromise?

One thing to note is that, even given the disadvantages of having one’s own website, one can still have a website but primarily post in places other than one’s own website, for instance in Facebook groups or on topic-specific websites. For instance, I post all of my research relevant to cause prioritization on the Cause Prioritization Wiki.

In addition, there is often information that cannot fit in other places. For instance, where does one put information about the account names one uses on various sites, or one’s contact information? Or if one wanted to write monthly or quarterly updates on the progress one makes on various projects, like gwern and Vipul Naik.

Notes on having mine


  1. This question also surfaces in redirection: is it better to specify redirection in the pages’ metadata (as on this site currently) or have separate pages that contain redirection (as on gitit or MediaWiki)?↩︎

  2. Using a lint could also be useful here.↩︎

  3. This is the case with many things, such as two layers of escaped backslashes when matching a single literal backslash using a regular expression in Python (i.e. the regular expression is "\\\\" because Python sees this as \\ and to match a literal backslash one must escape it—but thankfully Python has raw strings so r"\\" also works). Or consider the case of two nested tmux sessions, where one session is running locally, from which one uses ssh to connect to a remote machine and attaches to a remote tmux session. If the prefix keys are identical in both sessions, say, C-b, then one must type four instances of C-b to send a literal C-b to the remote shell: two to send a literal C-b to the local tmux session, which turns into a prefix on the remote session, then two more to make that literal.↩︎