I keep seeing these VeriSign commercials about getting one’s own website. I have often thought about it, but can’t really think of what I would put on it. I mean, why clog up the 'Net with my meaningless drek?
Then again, I’ve seen some websites that really suck.
I feel that if you’re going to go through the trouble of making a site, especially if it gains followers, the least you could do is update once in a while. If you end running out of time, at least post a note to that effect. Or just take it down. I found a semi-decent 70’s based site and it went un-updated (ha! take that Webster) for nearly 3 years! When it finally came back, the creator explained that he had other commitments and the original server he was using was having financial troubles, etc.
Anyways. What kind of stuff do you put on your sites? Is it just a vanity thing? Do you get comments (assuming you have a “guestbook” type feature)? How often do you maintain it?
I have three main areas: information on an old cartoon show (Battle of the Planets), information on the band Redgum, and the other stuff (miscellaneous crap, IOW).
I do get comments, but I don’t have a guestbook - people email me. Most of the comment comes from Redgum fans. There’s not a lot of information about the band on the web, so I get appreciative emails from (literally) around the world.
As to updates…well, it goes in fits and starts. All parts of the website are still under construction - I need to do more episode guides, more lyrics, that sort of thing, and I’m prone to changing the look or layout of the pages occasionally. I try not to let more than a couple of weeks go by without putting something new up there.
For me it’s vanity. Also to try out different languages and programs. I update it daily but I’m not going to be updating it anytime soon. The only thing bad about vanity sites are the ones that are created and nothing’s ever done with them past the first page of animated gifs of “under construction”.
I constructed mine mainly for the people on another board I post on devoted to pets. In fact, alot of us have our own sites to share our pictures. It’s better than clogging up the forum server with our pictures.
I recently noticed, however, that Google had spidered one of my pages. I do have a guestbook, I’m anxious to see if any “outsiders” visit and leave a comment.
I don’t have any illusions as to the “importance” of my site, in fact I originally titled it “Stuff No One Cares About But Us” and then realized that may be taken as a back-handed insult to other people who maintain personal websites, so I retitled it “Stuff About Us”.
I update approximately monthly - I’m fixing to link to my and my son’s employer’s pages, and I want to put a link to this board - I had decided to do that one day and instead discovered the board was hacked and out of service!
I have a Yahoo site that I use to provide information about my games to the players. I run a couple of D&D games, fantasy football, some paintball, and anything else that someone wants to play.
Most of the content is related to my D&D campaigns. I update between sessions; we play every two weeks or so. I have been inviting online players to join us; no one has so far, but I’ve only invited Dopers to this point.
My advice: Get a free Yahoo site like mine, and write some content- any content- and find out what you want or need to say, then say it in an interesting manner for your readers.
There is a button at the bottom of this post which will take you to my site- this is just one way of getting people to read your page.
If you don’t have any content, don’t bother. What’s the point? It’s like publishing a book of blank pages.
I wouldn’t say I did mine out of “vanity” as such, but definitely self-indulgence. It’s a pretty strange collection of things I happen to enjoy writing about: food, “beautiful things”, etc. Also, I had some content I wanted to put on-line (satirical material from a now-defunct website about Hong Kong politics). One part of it - a diary - is updated weekly. People who see it say they like it, but maybe they’re being polite.
I used the geocities page compiler (or whatever they call it). Pretty easy. Unfortunately, you get dumb ads popping up. But if I can do it, anyone can. Take a look if you like…
Eh, mine’s mostly for vanity. I really like to read other people’s essays and stuff like that on their websites, so I’m posting some of my own on my website.
I don’t get many visitors, but it amuses me. I do get comments occasionally in my e-mail and my guestbook, so that’s pretty cool. I get a lot of people reading my online journal that think I’m the most intriguing person in the world. Hmm.
I generally have a big update every month or so. I would update my site more, but ( ::glares at her website provider:: ) it seems that my website is up but I can’t log in to my stats or my FTP space at times. I think the provider is having severe growing pains.
My site’s main purpose is to get my family tree out there where people can find it, so distant cousins and I can get together to collaborate.
To justify it’s existance, I offer free lookups of the Australian records that are in my possession. It’s my way of paying the universe back for all those lookups done for me before I got my own copies of the records. I also have a section of links which I hope others will find as useful as I do (it’s offline at the moment because I’m reconstructing it).
Once upon a time, I had a family and friends section with photos and so forth, but I removed them when I changed hosts because they took up a lot of space, and then I decided not to replace them because they really had nothing to do with the subject at hand and were of no interest to anyone but me and my friends - in fact, they were originally put up in reaction to the friends of mine who complained that my website was filled with boring stuff (there are some sickos in the world who don’t find my family tree as fascinating as I do). I have recently added a personal photo gallery which I intend to expand over time (space permitting).
In addition, under my website, I host the local Fibromyalgia Support Group’s website, which I designed and maintain as my contribution to the group. I don’t consider that part of my site, it’s totally stand-alone. I have just added another small site to the collection, It’s Kitty Time, which is just a place where people can see photos of my four week old kittens.
I was once an academic and a social theorist, and I put up a web site to make the papers and articles that spelled out my theoretical perspectives available as if I had published them.
Time went on; my academic career, which was already sinking at the time I created the web site, finished collapsing in ruins, and I ended up doing other things for a living.
A few people read my writings and wrote comments in my guest book or emailed me privately to say brief and complimentary things about my writings or perspectives. A few wrote to say brief and uncomplimentary things about me and my dreck, too, to be honest. And a handful wrote me to say they were trying to do a school paper and found my site while searching for online resources and could I recommend other materials or answer certain questions about theory for them? But for the most part, I never received correspondence from other people who took social theory seriously (as I did) and wanted to hash out differences in our perspectives and belief systems.
Not being an academic any more, I had few reasons to keep writing theory, and also few reasons to stay current, especially as the theoretical trends moved in a direction I did not agree with. So my links are often dead-end and my papers are old. Some would say out-of-date. And I seldom take the time to edit it much.
But last fall I got an inquiry about whether or not a college textbook could print one of my articles, so I’m gonna be in print again so all in all I’m glad the site is still up there. And although I’m a bit disillusioned about the power of social theory to inspire people and help them understand and/or change their world, I still think they are good papers and my theory is still good theory.
(You are welcome to draw your own opinions. Click the web site button associated with this post if you wish to see my site)
A guy I know signed up with Verisign/Network Solutions for his website. When I started building the site for him, I couldn’t find the File Manager. I tried using my favourite FTP program to upload the files. No joy. I tried getting through to Verisign and it took about 45 minutes on hold before I got through to someone. I explained my problem and they told me that I could not upload any files. They had templates into which subscribers would enter what they want, and the page would be one of their standard designs.
WTF, over? Who ever heard of using prepackaged web pages? I told them that that couldn’t be right. You don’t just buy a web page, enter some information, and viola there it is! It has to be designed by or for the individual! I was told that their program requires that you use one of their web pages. Screw that! I got the guy’s domain switched over to a different (and much cheaper) server and built his page there.
The reason I actually got off my butt and put them up, is because we had lots of family and friends who were not at our wedding (15 guests only). Some live overseas, and some just plain weren’t invited Anyway, to stop the whinging, I shoved 6 photos up on a page, so the friends and relatives could see us, and that’s about it.
Once uni break comes around, I’m hoping to get a whole heap of our travel photos, underwater photos and reviews of various dive sites up there. And yes, nobody will probably ever see it, but I’ll learn stuff doing it, and enjoy myself.
My site mostly has a bunch of humor stuff, but the real core of the site is a race car tuning guide for the video game Gran Turismo. It hasn’t been updated in a long time because I don’t have a Playstation 2, so I couldn’t add any info about GT3. Lately, I’ve been thinking about revamping the guide and taking it in a new direction (basically, generalizing it for all driving games) and plan on working on it within the next few weeks.
[/shameless plug mode]
As far as comments, the GT guide and one of the humor pages (a movie spoof) get a lot of traffic, and I have guestbooks on those pages to keep the volume of the “keep up the good work!”-type email down. The GT guide generates the most email, mostly people asking questions about specific handling problems.
You mean something like this page? Yeah, I’ve been meaning to finish that…
Up until last semester, I taught intro psychology courses, so I posted my student’s points totals and grades on my site. None of the other tutors did this (not that we had to, of course), so I was pleased with myself for coming up with the idea. I updated it weekly (weakly :D). I also had an online syllabus, and grade calculating thingamajig. Occasionally, I’d have links to other sites or a Far Side cartoon. But I don’t teach anymore, so I haven’t updated the psych stuff since December. Last semester’s stuff is still up, and I plan to keep it up until the semester is over, in May.
I also have a fuzzy picture of me (it’s my corner of a sticker-picture) and my X-Files episode guide. The latter gets updated when I remember, which is roughly once a month.
Spider-
The main program used by search engines to retrieve web pages to include in their database.
Spidering-
While a spider is downloading pages, it is called Spidering. Most modern spiders used by search engines are only responsible for downloading the pages and storing them raw in a temporary database. An indexer is then used to process the page for inclusion in a search engine database. Spiders have a wide range of variables and guidelines that they can be setup to use and follow. Some include: speed at which it downloads pages, whether it will walk or crawl through a website, whether it only goes after index pages, what time of day it is active, which domains it will connect to, how many pages it will accept from one domain.
I worked so hard to get that coding done and now all I have left is a few code cleaning tasks and a pic or five to scan, and it has been sitting for at least a month. Fucking cable TV.
Oh, you mean pages people actually visit? I somehow doubt I’d have to worry about that.
But for me it isn’t a vanity thing. More people need to let Eris into their lives. And I won’t stop trying until I actually have to work at it. Hail Eris!
Well, I have two places I update too. One is the link at the bottom of my post. I think it’s to my Blogger site, but it might be my personal site. Anyways, my blogger is for posting things that have happened to me and whatnot. It’s mainly a way for my friends to see what’s going on in my life, as no one else really reads it.
so all in all I’m glad the site is still up there. And although I’m a bit disillusioned about the power of social theory to inspire people and help them understand and/or change their world, I still think they are good papers and my theory is still good theory.
Anyway, to stop the whinging, I shoved 6 photos up on a page, so the friends and relatives could see us, and that’s about it.
