With this journal done I will finally be caught up with my journal writing. Sometimes I think this is more trouble than it's worth. I hope fifty years from now the older me appreciates the effort that the younger me has put into writing all these entries. In any case I don't think I have a topic to write about today.

Today I will talk about personal web sites. There are a lot of people who have their own web sites, either focusing on their own interests or focused on a particular topic. People set it their web sites using their own machines or on their ISP's machines or using a free web hosting server.

What do I think is a good personal web site? Well, it kind of depends on what I'm looking for. Web sites dedicated to a topic, such as a celebrity or an activity or whatever should try to maintain accurate information. Links to the official site, information, not necessarily news. Take a site dedicated to a singer, for example. I'd like a link to the official site and official fan club. But since many official sites are lacking in information I'd like to know discographies, lyrics, tour dates (past, present, and future), band member bios, history.

I'm getting a bit offtrack here, but way too many dedicated personal sites are lacking in that kind of information. So really they're just a few pictures and the same lack of information as the next site. If you're going to do this then what you can do is put your own personal twist on the subject. Write essays about your experiences, how the subject affects you. Put up your own pictures, not pictures copied from somewhere else. Basically, make it your own because that way it will definitely be original and has a higher chance of being interesting.

I've seen few personal sites, since I'm usually looking for specific information not wandering around looking at people's miscellaneous works. But a personal site should reflect the author. Put some information about yourself, talk about your interests, link to your passions. As we get more and more people on the Internet creating more and more sites, we're going to have way too many sites dedicated to South Park, each saying the same thing over and over again. It'll be hard to be original by focusing on an external subject, so focus on yourself, your family and friends and things local to you.

Getting back to me (it's always about me), I don't try to provide an informative site about Ms Leick. There are lots of great sites that focus on her and/or Callisto, no way I could compete with them and it'd be hard for me to do it without violating my sense of copyrights. So I only have stuff that I wrote and one or two things I've gotten from other people (with permission). My site is really just a place for me to show off some of my creative works or not so creative works. A place for me to put my mark and not go off quietly into the night.

I really hate commercialism. It just seems to me that you have a site and you put ads on it then it's like you built the site just to make money rather than as a labor of love. (Incidentally, Natalie Imbruglia doesn't own her own domain name based on her name. It's done by someone else and although it's a nice site it does have ads and nowhere do they explicitly claim they are not associated with Natalie. I assumed it was an official site until I went to the real official site. That's just wrong.) Sometimes you can't help it if you are using a free web hosting service (although some allow you to pay for a no-ads option) but otherwise it seems to cheapen your dedication, making it a bit tawdry in my eye. Especially ads that you can't possibly support 100% (unless your really into the hard core stuff).

That's it for my spiel.