I'm at an odd place with my personal website. Before Dec. 2023, it was a "professional portfolio" for my compositions. Now that I'm interested in the IndieWeb community, I want to make something more personal. I don't think I want to make two sites, but I do still need a portfolio for my composition work.
I just read @maggie's post on "digital gardens" and I really like that idea. (1/n)
@reillypascal@maggie I too am trying to figure out what it looks like to move my website from a collection of essays into something more freeform. I started putting up pages for random things & then realized I needed some form of organization. I’m still figuring it out but it’s fun to watch other people go through this as well
@mattly something I didn't mention but that I've been thinking about is how much I like some of the early "net art" or other experiments with hypertext, e.g., Olia Lialina's "my boyfriend came back from the war" (http://www.teleportacia.org/war/).
I don't know what would be a way to make something like that today that was fresh and original, but I'm thinking about it
@reillypascal@mattly I saw something that @gregorlove.com@gregorlove.com posted today in the Indieweb chat that I thought you might like, some retro ascii art for music downloads:
@alabut ooh I love this! When I get around to releasing a record, I might do this. I did some ASCII bubble letters on this instruction .txt file that comes with the performance materials for this recent piece: https://applytriangle.bandcamp.com/track/if-this-reaches-you
@reillypascal Also if you liked that, you’ll probably also love this collaborative sci-fi project called Cosmic Voyage. It’s all text-based because it’s the web interface to an alternative protocol called Gemini, sort of like old school Gopher. Found out about it through our indieweb buddy @johanna
I definitely want to add more pages, and once I add dropdowns within the menus, that'll be easier to organize. My main thing is that I don't know how to strike a balance of "personal" and "portfolio" in the content I put on my site.
Does anyone else have experience/thoughts on this? (2/2)
@reillypascal hey Reilly! You’re doing fine and no need to overthink it. Take it from me, I have the same approach and it works well: home page is optimized for professional content and steers direct traffic to your case studies or samples, and trust that the indie crowd will find you through RSS, Mastodon, etc.
If you want more reading into the strategy and aren’t put off by startup growth hack language, the early commercial web in the 2000’s called this The Mullet Strategy: “business up front, party in the back.” I’m pretty sure it was first coined about Digg’s advertising strategy but I can’t find a reference, this is the closest I could get:
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