The rewrite bug may be catching
Nathan's already posted about his urge to rewrite his blog, so this is sort of in the same vein. However, my motivation is coming mainly from my recent signup on LinkedIn and the recent launch of the East Tennessee .NET User's Group site.
Basically, I have a lot of professional, programming-career-oriented traffic pointed at my site. This is important now, because I am unfortunately spinning my wheels in my current job (which may change now that we have a third programmer, but who knows). While I'm really liking my current setup, it's just not professional grade. Nor do I want it to be--I like posting the occasional bit of stupid crap, or random musings, or even whiny rants to get stuff off my chest. (Although, admittedly, Chainsaw Buffet has been a nice outlet for the wacky stuff and the random philosophical musings, but at the same time, it's just made me more likely to write them.)
It might be, if I posted more programming articles, but I have to confess I don't do a lot of coding off work time these days. I do the occasional bit of contract work. And most of what I do for myself isn't nifty new stuff, it's focused effort to create a particular thing. (I could rant about how the obsession with creating a finished, perfect product kills my productivity, but that's another story. Actually, I probably already have posted something like this, and if not, it's in my responses to Nathan's "To Build A Blog" series.)
So my thinking is, I should probably change dylanwolf.com into a more professional site. We're talking resumé, links to projects, that stuff. Nothing major, and we're not talking about a very complex site in terms of programming. But a simple "brochure" about me.
What I could then do is move what is now dylanwolf.com off to overanalyzed.net, a domain name I randomly bought a couple of months ago. (I think it pretty much describes the way I think, post, etc.) I had a brief flash of motivation for doing something with this site, which I think was going to be a place to post random thoughts. (Which, really, wouldn't have been too much more than a personal Twitter.)
Unfortunately, as "right" as this feels, there's also something that doesn't feel right about it. As much as I like the domain name overanalyzed.net, dylanwolf.com has been my personal site for about a year and I'd hate to give that up (nevermind all the redirects I'd have to set up--SEO would never be the same).
Plus, I can build the Programming section to be a more fitting representation of my professional side, while leaving everything else in place. I can be extremely professional (or at least extremely serious, which isn't the same thing, but is a close enough approximation) but at the same time I can be odd. I don't think I'm so odd that it'll scare off potential employers, and might show me as a more balanced person.
Besides, from my experience reading my web stats, no one freaking follows links. You get all paranoid about how someone might see that one tiny thing you posted on that one particular page, and then you find out that most people don't spend that much time digging around on other people's sites. It's depressing, really, considering that I often do, but it's also a healthy alternative to "people can find out everything you've ever said online!" paranoia.
So I guess the point of my post is, what do you think? Move the blog to overanalyzed.net and build dylanwolf.com as a separate professional site? Or leave dylanwolf.com as is and beef up the Programming content?
Comments
Professional vs Private
Now that I got that out of my system:
It can always be fun to work on your site and try to make it better and slicker. Much like your line of thought, I spent a bit of time thinking to create a personal / professional website.
However, after a bit of work, I realized that I did not have the time and energy to dedicate to making articles for both sites and maintaining both sites. Also, I think that having a personal blog w/ professional leanings is not a bad thing either. I read most blogs because they are interesting and most of the interesting blogs have a very strong personal touch. Admittedly, if you mix your personal and professional blogs, there are some topics that you would not cover. This is the main reason that my "Penis Hand" post never made it live on my site. Despite this, my leanings would be not to split up your blog into 2 separate sites.
To be honest, if you are truly committed to setting up a professional site, I would jump on one those these free blog platforms that all the .Net guys are using ( http://weblogs.asp.net ) and re-post your code-based blogs to those. This way, you can still maintain your site, keep up its content, but at least have a 2nd on a professional space that is "trendy" (I know you will hate that adjective) among most of the .Net Community (Scott Gu being the best example). You will probably get quite a few extra hits, just for being on their platform and you will not have to deal w/ double-site maintenance issues.
Anyway, if you go the Live Writer route, which is what I have been working and learning (w/ special thanks to Mike’s Site and his Live Writer Enabled Codeplex Project), you will be able to write and post to both blogs pretty effectively.
Finally, if you are rewriting in .Net, let me know. We can put our heads together and main a common project that we both can use, if you want.
Just a thought.
Nathan
And on another note...
And again, lol.
If you are thinking of generating business based content from a site, I can't say that it would seem very productive. In my experience, personal contacts are far far far more benificial than anything I have ever gotten online.
Of course, I am not the best example here, since my site has been a bit a of a hit or miss. Perhaps someone else could comment on this issue?
Professioal vs. Personal
You know, the "PH" article is welcome on Chainsaw Buffet, if you don't want to post it anywhere else. (Although admittedly, it's so crazy that I'm even a little leery of posting it there, but then, I've been similarly leery of some of the things Chad has written.) As a side note, thanks for putting those words on my blog after you said you didn't want to post them on yours. :P
Also...
Site design, Links, etc.
I also changed the default skin to my website to be more professional. Now, if you don't want to see the "walnut design", you can do so... if you're logged in.
For me, one of my friends told me he never visited my website at work because it was vivid yellow and obviously not a "work friendly" site.
I second Nathan's comments about 2 websites... Though, I also have that problem. I've been trying to figure out what to use pseudocode.net for for the last year. Hehe. Ah well.
Oh, also...
When it matters... they look. When I was graduating college I came back from an out-of-state interview and looked in my logs and found someone from the state I'd been to had found my website by searching for my name, then scoured everything on the site. This was before it was a friends-only site.
... That also factored into my decision. ;-)
How to get traffic
On the topic - it depends. Since I have a goal of speaking more and being more involved in the .net community my site should reflect that. Last year I stopped posting the political stuff, and focused more on .net related posts. This year I'm going to do what you are thinking about doing - creating a separate blog for personal blogging - one where I can post and not give a damn about google friends urls or if people read more than how to add a total to a gridview (number one post still... only eclipsed by a silverlight post for one week).
To do this, I'm rewriting ViNull Siding to be more generic so I can use it as a platform to run both. i rationalize this away as i need a project to play with so I can talk about it at conferences =p
Traffic
Ironically, I'm not horribly concerned about more traffic here (CB yes, but not here). I just have a bit of an ego thing as far as how people find me and what they read. Admittedly, it's a bit on the unhealthy side.
In this way, it's sometimes worse to have good web stats than better, because you get hung up on overanalyzing things you'd take for granted otherwise. No matter how much data you have about what people read, it still won't tell you what people are thinking when they read your site, and how they tend to browse the internet. Which is really interesting from many perspectives, because we all do different things when browsing, and frankly, you're always going to consider your content more readable and interesting than it is. (I think I wrote up an article for CB about web stats, but I didn't post it because it sounded really freaking depressing.)
And yeah, most of my posts are still coming from the GridView sorting articles, although I do get the occasional SharePoint topic or "AWA 2007 photos" or whatnot.
If it makes you feel better...
In fact, I am ranked #8 on the search terms for tveristy and linux... woot! lol
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