One of the downsides to having a personal site, as a developer, is that some people will expect it to be a professional portfolio and showcase. So, there's pressure to keep updating it, to at least hint at your use of the latest Web frameworks, awareness of SEO/promotion, etc.
My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve URLs for some open source contributions. It's also personal, with none of my professional work on it.
I'd bet the vintage look has cost me a few business opportunities, but not every aspect of my life has to follow this year's commercial fashion. Shoot me if I ever give my little personal site a stock React look, or a big dynamic anti-Web framework, or third-party CDNs to mitigate bloat hosting costs, or something like that. :)
Cheers on the note “my professional work isn’t here”. Makes me wonder if I should be more explicit like that.
I have to side with you on this.
And I do use those modern frameworks at work.
My goal was to keep mine working coherently in Lynx, but uses some JS for syntax highlighting and a click event or two that degrade well enough.
It’s also an awful hacked together static-ish blog in Go behind Nginx. I was working on an improvement last night and realized how much I’d learned since I wrote it. It’s funny and frustrating at the same time. Might be time to start over again.
I spent years rebuilding my site several times over, trying to appear as professional and modern as possible.
A while back I got fed up, spent about 15-20 minutes writing some basic html, and came up with a simple page. I haven't looked back since. https://danielvaughn.github.io/info/
I get a scary-looking warning in Firefox when I click that link. It says:
"Someone could be trying to impersonate the site and you should not continue.
Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust danielvaughn.github.io because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates.
Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER"
To continue to your site, I'd have to click the button "Accept the Risk and Continue", which not everyone will do. I just want you to know in case you want to look into it.
For what one person's opinion is worth, I quite like the look of old-style text-and-hyperlink websites, so long as there's something interesting to read on them.
Not a personal website, but the text and hyperlink homepage of Berkshire Hathaway is unique. Don't think you'll find another multi-billion dollar company homepage like this: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
I find that nowadays 98% of my time and effort on the personal website is on the blog. I've thought about trashing the rest, but still have some old links to papers and resources I put together years ago that I can be bothered to update. One of these days...
Given that I mainly publish Tor onion sites, it's mostly all plain HTML. Because it's faster via Tor, with less back and forth. I did, under pressure, do one clearnet site with a CSS library, and multiple classes with different column layouts. But I make no pretense about website skills.
I love the Racket stuff on your site! If it were me hiring seeing something cool and unexpected like that would be a much bigger plus than a generic Material UI site.
My own personal site's current look is pretty much an early CSS approximation of my old `table`-based layout, and is now mainly to preserve URLs for some open source contributions. It's also personal, with none of my professional work on it.
I'd bet the vintage look has cost me a few business opportunities, but not every aspect of my life has to follow this year's commercial fashion. Shoot me if I ever give my little personal site a stock React look, or a big dynamic anti-Web framework, or third-party CDNs to mitigate bloat hosting costs, or something like that. :)