Monday, November 14, 2011

Monday, November 14, 2011 - , 2 comments

Do I Need a Personal Website - Part I

When I was a new driver on the internet superhighway, one of my first ISPs was MindSpring (which eventually became Earthlink). One of the perks that came with the service was you got x number of email addresses and the same number of websites ... depending on your plan.

At that time, blogs were a very new thing. I don't think very many people understood the best way to use them, how you could customize them, and create networking communities. But companies were developing their websites at a rapid rate. In the mean time, there was experimentation with personal websites. (This is all pre Myspace and Facebook, you understand.)

So, I thought that I'd give it a shot. MindSpring provided moderately customizable templates. And if you were HTMLly inclined, you could be quite imaginative. I had another website where I stored all of my images, mostly emoticons of some sort, but there may have been the odd picture of Orlando Bloom. ;)


It was really nice. (I mean having the website, not the picture of Orlando. Though truth be told this pic still took my breath away.) It allowed me to share illustrated stories about my travel adventures with friends and family. I was able to redecorate with the seasons ... Hmmmm, that sounds remarkably like what I have here (in some ways) and on Facebook (in others), but I digress.

The thing is that when I went away to seminary, I closed my Earthlink account, and thereby, lost my webpage, something that I had continued to maintain despite the growth of other forms of social media. I tried to replace it with a free product from Wix.com, but I have never dedicated the effort required to take it to the level of personal expression of my previous site was.

The question is, Do I really need to do that? Tomorrow, I'll continue to explore this question, and maybe we'll be able to come up with a satisfying answer.

2 comments:

I guess the only answer I can provide is...if you want to, then yes.

I'm a firm believer in want vs need motivation. Do you need it is an entirely different question that do you want it. I'm sure you understand the difference pretty well.

Travis: I guess that's what I'm trying to decide, whether I Really want to. Or if I'm just hanging onto something that became a habit, something that I've been used to.

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