Death of the personal web site?
Jeffery Zeldman mourns the death of the personal web site but is it really dead? He says the take up of Social Network sites means that people are moving away from creating there own personal web site to using the social network pages they create as there personal presence on the web.
This may be true for most people as the tools used on these sites mean that you can get a presence on the web with out much technical abillity. But why have I decided to take the step of creating a site of my own? I could have gone to one of the Social Network sites and created a profile and done exactly the same as what I indend to do here. But is that the right thing to do?
May be its because I am a developer with the skill set to create my own and I want the challenge? But also my time could have been better spent working on other projects so why take the time to create it?
The main reason why I choose to create my own site was because I wanted a centralised location for my web content. I may use Flickr to organise my photos but I want to use those photos on my own personal site so using the Flickr APIs I can do that. See the Flickr demo that just imports the images in a set from my Flickr account and displays them on a page on this web site. Using this it is still possible to keep my design and incorporate the external data.
I may want people to follow me on twitter but rather than having them leave my site and head over to twitter I would like them to click a link on my site to add me to the people they are following. This may be possible using Twitters API (I guess this will be a project for tonight) but I guess that it may not be practical. This is because the user would need to enter there detials into my site to get my twitter stream added to there list of followed people. Would you be happy to type your username, password into a web sit that you may not trust?
Another reason why I choose to create my own site was to keep complete control on how my presence is displayed from the colours used to the images displayed even the fonts used and the sizes of the fonts. I may decide in the future that I want to use a Social Network site in the future to maintain blogs and contacts but I would still like to keep this all centalised and implement it on my personal site again keeping control on what is displayed using APIs.
Are personal web sites a dying breed? No I do not think so. Most people will have a personal web site but it may be a part of a bigger overall Social Network site with the Social Network site providing functionallity it also may be spread over many Social Sites but they will have one main site that links to the others and back again to bring it all together.