A Personal Website Should Have a Junk Drawer

A personal website can contain server notes, leadership essays, old projects, and whatever else its owner was interested in that week.

A junk drawer usually begins with reasonable intentions. You put batteries in it, followed by scissors and the tiny screwdriver that came with something you no longer own. Eventually, the drawer contains four keys nobody recognizes and a takeout menu from a restaurant that closed during the previous presidential administration.

It is still useful. You just have to accept that usefulness is no longer the same thing as organization.

I think a personal website should be allowed to work this way.

A business website usually has one job. A portfolio should help someone hire you. A store should help someone buy something. A newsletter page should collect an email address without making the visitor solve a puzzle first. These are sensible expectations when the website exists to support a particular result.

A personal site belongs to a person, which creates an immediate problem for this approach. People are poorly optimized. They develop interests with no concern for whether those interests share a target audience.

My site has notes about configuring servers, a guide to setting up a malware analysis machine, essays about work, and pages for two books about leadership and communication. There is no clean content strategy that explains why a person reading about dynamic DNS should also be offered my thoughts on promising a briefing by Friday. I cared about both things long enough to write them down.

That mix is a small emergency if the goal is a clean funnel. As a record of one person's work and interests, it seems fine.

The older web was full of this kind of useful disorder. Someone's homepage might have photos, a list of favorite albums, a tutorial for a piece of software, and a guestbook where strangers could formally certify that they had visited. A page sometimes existed because its owner had learned how to make a background image repeat and intended to receive the full value of that knowledge.

Those sites could be difficult to use. Nostalgia should not require us to pretend otherwise. There were mysterious navigation icons, unreadable text, and pages that played music before asking whether the visitor had somewhere quiet to be. Still, you could often tell that a particular person had made the thing.

That quality is harder to preserve when every page must justify itself as part of a brand. Old posts look off-message. Small experiments look unfinished. A topic with no obvious connection to the main subject becomes something to move elsewhere, where it can begin the process of being abandoned in a more professional setting.

Cleaning up can help. Broken links do not become charming because they are personal, and nobody benefits from searching six menus for the contact page. But tidying a site is different from making every part of it point toward the same transaction.

The unrelated pages do some work of their own. They show how a person's interests changed. A technical note that solved one annoying problem can remain useful years after it stopped fitting the homepage. An old project can explain the newer one sitting beside it. Even the abandoned experiments say something, although occasionally what they say is that buying a domain name is much easier than maintaining enthusiasm for the idea attached to it.

There is also something pleasant about following one subject into another without an algorithm deciding the route. You arrive for instructions on a server, notice an article about a client request, and discover that the same person has written a book. You may leave immediately. That is allowed too. A personal website does not need to turn every visitor into evidence that the website worked.

I still want each article here to make sense on its own. The server notes should help with the server. An essay should give the reader a reason to finish it. The books should be easy to find for someone who wants them. The junk drawer comparison only works if the drawer still closes, but there is room inside for a few things that belong there simply because they belong to you.

The internet has plenty of polished front doors. I would like personal websites to keep a drawer somewhere behind them containing an old script, an unfinished idea, and at least one key nobody is ready to throw away.

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