Why have a blog?

When preparing this whole homepage and the blog, I shared the concept with my better half. And immediately got questioned, "Why?". It struck me because I was thinking about having my own page/blog for such a long time that I was caught speechless at that moment. That does not mean I have no answer, so let me elaborate.

My tiny island in the ocean of the Internet

We all (yes, you too probably) have an account on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever is now cool & in social network, and even though every account has its own space where people can share, it does not feel personal. At least not for me. There is little space for customisation, and I am not even mentioning the dependency on the Big Tech, which I'm not a fan of. In addition, the potential posts are available for everyone – friends or even the public, or more precisely, the content gets to the people who are not interested.

With a personal webpage, I have control over everything, the overall concept, the visual presentation, and the content – I can write whatever I want (which is not always the case on the mainstream platforms, as we've seen, especially in the past year). Plus, the people visiting it too have the same control – I can't spam you; you have to look the page up actively. And that will happen if only there will be some reason to do so.

Yes, having your site is probably a bit time consuming compared to using some already available service; you have to build the page, adapt it for various devices, and take care of it. However, these are advantages to me. Being an informatician/programmer, building a page from scratch is a quite valuable experience. And it's practical too. Nowadays, I do not work with HTML/CSS/JavaScript (web technologies) too often, so it's pretty to have a pet project with which you can play and see the result in real-time (and share it, so there is a bit of self-pressure to make it at least OK... well, at least in theory). Moreover, I have a few neat features that I'd like to implement, so there is another path to learn (and burn myself :) ).

Place to share

Even though I've been talking about the blog mainly, there is more to the website than that. And how much more is entirely dependent on you! For mine, you can see multiple sections in the header, which I described in the previous post. For example, I have a section where I recommend interesting sources – podcasts, video lectures, and articles divided into categories based on their subjects. At least Facebook has understood that's a nice-to-have feature, and now (somehow) it supports it. Having a website is still a more versatile solution, though.

I want to emphasise the blog part once again, especially the writing side, because that's probably the most important thing here and something I genuinely miss from my grammar school years. Back then, I had to write regularly at school and as a part-time editor, but the demand for writing disappeared practically after entering the university. I would lie if I tell you I did not expect that (after all, I applied for the Faculty of Informatics); however, it seems like a missed opportunity (after all, writing and reading are crucial skills in our western civilisation). It's also connected with my notion of university, which might be a subject for some future blog posts...

Anyway, this little project is simply (although not solely) a way how to do something about it, so I hope it'll survive the start of the upcoming semester.

And that's enough for today; I think I lay out some of the reasons for having my own website, and the next time I might finally have a topic unrelated to the blogging itself.