Recently I pushed a new, streamlined version of my personal website. Not this one, which bears my name, but the shorter, dot-org-ier version of the username I choose if I’m early enough—which, these days, I’m usually not.
Part of me was looking for a tiny creative project. But it was important that it be pretty darn small, as I was just looking to get something together in the margins of the weekend.
What’s a simple website look like in 2022? I couldn’t get the retro constraints of 8 bit out of my mind, so I ended up with this:
My “web designer” days are far behind me so I went looking for an existing theme. Instead, I found some nostalgic CSS styles. It didn’t include layout and using a framework for a tiny page seemed overkill. So, I went retro here, too: I swiped HTML from the demo page with some old-fashioned View Source.
Somewhere along the line, I bumped into a blog post by the creator of these NES.css styles. Their primary motivation was kismet:
I like simple
That was my email signature for a long time and certainly behind the naming of Simplicity Rules®.
Why adamd.org Needed a Change
In fact, it was an email signature that sent me off to cobble together this new, 8 bit personal portal. Most of my online profiles now point to my business site. Recently, in an effort to get “business conversations” in the right inbox, I switched out to a more personal signature for personal email… which led me to visit adamd.org.
Its small digital footprint was crumbling:
- An embedded video was broken
- It used an old business logo
- My “professional timeline” stopped in 2018
- There was no mention of my latest book
Worse yet, there was a section titled “What I actually do” that went on to not describe very well what I actually do now.
Oops.
Rather than replace every section of the old site, I used the two simplicity paths to arrive at the core of what’s needed today. I’m calling the new site a personal portal because it mostly points out to other places to find me on the web. It;s there as a snapshot of my most important projects right now.
As a writer, I think in word counts. The new site only includes 126 words. If I had more time, I might try to cut that down some more, as I’m sure Mark Twain would have written on his website.
And… What Else is New?
One of the projects on this new personal portal really deserved its own post here. Alas, at this point I’ve buried the lede…
I wrote another book!
Published in May 2021, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist shares the philosophy behind my work. More importantly, it’s helped over 1,000 marketers reach more of the right developers. It was covered by Nordic APIs and Techcrunch.
A book a decade, I joked. Map Scripting 101, now out of print unless you count the five copies I still have, was published in August 2010. It received much more “coverage” on this here site.
Even by 2010 things on the web had changed. Social networks became the way we shared the latest. Blogs, which started as personal endeavors, became businesses… and businesses added blogs.
In 2007, I lamented that the personal website had disappeared. The hand-crafted, HTML playgrounds became templatized and themed. And I wrote those laments on a blog that was sterile by comparison.
Forgetting to note new achievements like books, jobs, and—I dunno—children is one sign of how both adamd.org and adamduvander.com haven’t kept up with changes. That may remain the case, but at least for now, both have some version of my latest news.
Simply put, that’s good enough for now.
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