Reset, Reflection, Renewal
Yet another new home on the web
Reset
Looking people up on the web is now a natural habit. Information about me is out there whether I like it or not. Having my own website is a chance to have some control over how people “see” me over the internet.
Web presence is a center of gravity. For years I’ve done a lazy job of moving blocks in squarespace and calling it a day. I had to put myself out there, but I wasn’t sure how.
I’ve arrived at a point where the price of squarespace and the laziness it affords me is more costly than the effort it takes to reset.
Reflection
Designing my web presence requires knowing how I want to present myself. Knowing myself is a lifelong journey, re-presenting myself on the web is a weekend’s worth of work. If I learned anything in the last decade of growth, it is that iteration is a tool for discovery. Something is better than nothing. Perfect is an enemy of good.
For the last few iterations of my home-on-the-web, I tried to maintain a blog. Blogging records ideas in a moment in time. I change my thinking frequently. Old thoughts are out of date almost the moment they are written.
I never liked to dwell on a “body of work”. Completing the project for the vanity of a record is a sunk cost fallacy. The goal of a self-initiated project is learning and exploration. Once accomplished, the project itself is unimportant.
Here goes another iteration, another project to learn from, another to add to my growing graveyard.
Renewal
One of my internet heroes is Maggie Appleton. She’s a designer, illustrator, and mediocre programmer (her words). She’s also an insightful writer of thoughtful essays about our technology and internet culture (my words). Her website was where I was first introduced to the idea of a “Digital Garden”
This idea came back to my brain’s surface as I thought about my new home on the internet where ideas can naturally grow and die. Where iterations and resets are built-in features.
I have tilled the soil of my new garden on the internet. Come back once in a while and see what’s growing.