So far, DoOO has emphasized the double-sided challenge of establishing and maintaining a good web identity. On the theoretical side, there are a plethora of questions: Firewall between personal/work personas? Integrated identity? Single unified website? Lots of different sites? Integration of social media?
Meanwhile, on the technical side, it’s not exactly simple either. This was made pointedly obvious in my cohort yesterday. I got very confused and ended up asking Andy a million questions trying to clarify how domain mapping works and how it’s related – or not – to hosting. Btw: sorry for highjacking the session, everyone!
After wasting everyone’s time and working on this in the afternoon, I came up with some diagrams that helped me understand the relationship between domain and hosting. I’ll even share them:
You can’t unsee it now, can you? My bad.
Anyway, the technical and philosophical questions are difficult enough on their own, but they’re related, compounding the challenge.
So for instance you want a good URL, but your name is too complicated or too common. Now you have to make a choice, based on both the philosophical (who are you on the Internet? Do you want a site-specific URL or an umbrella URL?) and also the requirements of the technology. Not to mention it has to be short enough so people can actually use it.
Snooty example: my name has an accent – Andréa (no, it’s not an affectation. It’s on my birth certificate and everything.) I can’t use that on my URL or any login or ID, though. It’s too bad, too: there are millions of Andrea Smiths. I’m the only Andréa Smith I know of, but I can’t use that.
And let’s not forget the dizzying number of options for any given choice. Yesterday, I installed a plugin on my new blog to show my twitter feed. I put “twitter” in the search box, and got 33 PAGES (!!!) of plugins. Many of them do the same thing, but still. Making the right choice isn’t easy for a newbie. And then there might be a new, better plugin one month later. Which means you can never leave well enough alone.
Bottom line: web presence alone could easily take over anybody’s time, let alone an academic who has to post all sorts of info every day. One of my goals during this course is to learn to approach this systematically.
One final note today: good habits to increase web presence are difficult to align with good habits for security. You have to try – install, sign up, etc. – a bunch of different stuff before finding the right fit. It’s tough to do that and not end up with lots of permissions for apps you only use once. I’ll have to work on that.
OK. Procrastination over. Now back to real work.
Funny. In terms of gardening, I’m content with not getting a nastygram from the city (and yes, I’ve gotten one before.) But I feel like web presence says much more about me, and to a much larger audience. Maybe it’s paranoia, but I just want to make sure it reflects who I am as closely (and positively) as possible.
I like the yard maintenance metaphor Tim. Sometimes I really get into making my yard look pretty–spring flowers and Christmas decorations come to mind. Most of the time I just am satisfied with not pissing off the neighbors or embarrassing myself by keeping things presentable. It’s safe to assume I might be the same sort of person in the digital garden.
This is a great post, and I love the illustrations from the Paper app! You’re absolutely right that the timesink of exploring these spaces, experimenting, and finding what works is very real. I kept a very simple blog for years with very few plugins, no sidebar, didn’t often upload images. I’ve changed it up a bit more in the past few months as I’ve had time to add some more dynamic stuff but it’s still not something I can say I spend a lot of time fretting over. Then again I was never great at yard maintenance either so maybe there’s a parallel there in that my personality doesn’t over analyze this stuff too much and I take a “do what you can when you can” approach.
Love the pics!