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Discussion on: You don't need a personal website (and why I no longer have one)

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tbroyer profile image
Thomas Broyer

Having a personal website is mostly about owning your content.

In case Dev.to moves in a direction you don't like and you'd want to move your content elsewhere, all your previous links (and cross links from other sites) would be dead; and this assumes you'd still be able to easily retrieve your content out of Dev.to (unless you keep a copy of all your content somewhere else already)

If you have a personal website with its own domain name, you can technically move your hosting at any time. Let's say you're using a simple Jekyll blog on GitHub Pages; you want to "protest" some GitHub decision and chose to move to Gitlab, you can do it without any service disruption: setup the same web site on Gitlab Pages, change your DNS, you're all set (OK, this doesn't apply to comments, this is much trickier; I personally chose to crosspost to Dev.to and have my comments there, but my personal website stays my canonical URL; I don't really care if I lose the comments, if some have a big interest, I should extract them into edits to the articles, or new articles altogether).

It's OK to use GitHub as your portfolio and LinkedIn as your resume, as long as you link to them from a web page at your own domain name (it's OK in this case because people likely won't bookmark your portfolio or your resume; it's different for articles where direct links are much more likely and you wouldn't want to break them)

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kdipippo profile image
Kathryn DiPippo

Good point! I was not considering the merits of hosting a website from the point of view of preserving the traceability of your content. Definitely worthwhile to pursue a website if the purpose extends beyond an online portfolio for job applications to one where you want to grow an online presence or just for greater control over your decisions/support. Thanks for the comment!

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khoinguyenkc profile image
khoinguyenkc • Edited

Yeah I think the biggest benefit of having a site is for owning your media, and from there, growing a subscriber list and things of that sort.