Sun Jun 04 2023 · 3 min read

What is a personal website?

Meta post about having a personal website.

I just changed my website. Earlier was hosted with GitHub Pages and now it just redirects to the Medium profile page. That made me ponder — What is a personal website? What is it supposed to do? What should be in it?

A trip down memory lane

The earlier site I mentioned was set up during my college days. Back in 2015, it was my final year and it was college placements season. Although I was never truly interested in taking a placement from college or a job in general, my parents wanted me to sit for it. “This can be your backup if you change your mind” — they said.

So, the first task of the “placements” is to make and submit your resume, but I went a step further and decided to set up a website. I always wanted to have a site, don’t know why! I couldn’t resist when I saw that the domain bhikadia.com (that’s my surname) was available. I always wanted to give my non-Gmail email to people and here I had [email protected] and in my head, it was the coolest thing I owned. Long story short — I picked a template (went with Sustain) — rewrote my resume in Markdown— and published it.

I graduated and never took any job, continued with my startup. The website remained as it is. The email address I was excited about — I never checked the inbox of it. The only update to the website I did was to remove my address and phone number, when I got a call from a random guy seeking guidance on career, he mentioned he got my number from the site.

So apart from accidentally breaching my privacy, the website was useless to me and I never worked on it from then.

Back to present

Now, the bug of having-a-cool-website has bitten me again! This time I wanted to start clean, so I decided to just have the Medium profile. This time equally unclear about what to do with it — came the genesis of this very meta article.

So, Why am I doing it?

• Without sounding narcissistic, I realized I do like talking about my work and things I am interested in with people in my private circle. But why do I hesitate to do the same in public?
• I fear people’s judgment and what to fight that rakshasa within. I want to make this website — the weapon against it.
• For a year or so — I have been writing in my private journal and started to like it. I think some of the ideas and writings would interest people in general.

To conclude, I am still determining where this (writing blogs) will take me. This might just wither like has happened in past, or for a change I make it bloom this time around.