Andy Chase

You would think that after 10 years of messing around with these web page things that it would be easy to figure out the best way to corral all of the various tidbits that go to make up one's online presence and put them all in one attractive yet highly usable package. Things like a weblog, or self-recorded MP3s, or a portfolio, or (increasingly important on a web full of services like Flickr, del.icio.us, and LinkedIn) links to other services.

What do the usability gurus do? Jeffrey Zeldman has dumped everything into WordPress, with sub-pages for a few main categories, with many links to older, static content in situ. Jakob Nielsen (does anyone still actually think of him as a usability guru?) just plasters his index page with links to every damn thing. It's a little bit disappointing; I was hoping there might be a better pattern to steal emulate.

My own online presence goes through cycles driven by environmental conditions; during a job search it becomes an attempt at a showcase. While happily employed it becomes a sandbox. While aspiring to "seriousness" it becomes yet another Kubrick-template-based-site. When tired of the endless inevitable tweaking that comes with hosting your own CMS, it becomes a plain old Blogger weblog.

The closest thing I've got to unity is my dashboard, which is where people currently go if they point their browser at the top of the achase.net domain. I like its hand-coded, old-school quaintness, but I have a feeling it lacks the panache people expect from a professional web developer's home page in 2006, and it still leaves me with several years' worth of content stored in several different CMSes on several different top and second-level domains.

What now? I have probably been over-thinking the problem of Grand Unification. If Zeldman, who has a large and devoted following, can just dump everything into Wordpress and hyperlink to the really old stuff, then a nonentity like myself probably can too.