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by crustacean 2473 days ago
Can anyone give advice about how you built your personal website(s?) while having strong professional interests in multiple areas? I’d be really grateful to see an example.

I have a career in tech and also a career in music. My professional networks in these areas don’t overlap. I don’t think everyone responds positively to the dual career thing, although some definitely do.

Just make two sites and don’t link them? Get a stage name vs a tech name? Create a unified portfolio as a creative technologist?

8 comments

I'm also in tech and music, though music is not a full time career for me. My personal website starts with a landing page and two links, one for the tech stuff, and the other for the music stuff.

I wrote my site by hand in plain HTML, just over 2 decades ago, have added some content but have not radically changed it. Anything that's more than 1 level deep pulls up a PDF of something or other. Maintenance is via FTP.

It still works on every browser, phone, OS, etc.

I did something a similar except instead of music I'm a huge theme park fan and wanted a portion of my personal site to be dedicated to my trips (instead of hosting the pictures on Facebook or the like) so I decided to separate out the roller coaster portion of my persona and put it at a subdomain of my personal site (https://coasters.joshimbriani.com for those curious) whereas my main site remains mostly tech focused (https://joshimbriani.com). I've been pretty pleased with the setup for now seeing as how I can nerd out about coasters without alienating the other half of my (non-existent) audience
Hey Josh!

Did you realize that your feed.xml seems to only link to

    http://localhost:4000/
instead of linking to your website like it should?
Thanks for the heads up! I thought I had fixed that problem but I guess it regressed somewhere along the way but it should be fixed now (minus some Cloudfront cache updating). Thanks!!
If you aren't trying to use your site as a sales and marketing platform, then just put them on different pages. The only reason you wouldn't put up all this stuff on the same overall site is if you are trying to maintain focus to optimize a conversion funnel.
> I’d be really grateful to see an example.

I'm a front-end web developer, here's my website: https://tobireif.com/ .

All hand-coded (no premade templates for example, all custom). Some text about me, demo-index with non-boxy design https://tobireif.com/demos/ (layout: mainly Flexbox), a simple index of posts https://tobireif.com/posts/ , contact data, that's mostly it.

> I have a career in tech and also a career in music.

> Just make two sites [...] ?

Yep, that sounds advisable. Good luck!

I wrote my own in php years ago... ewams.net

Most of the things I post are not directly tied to my current job but more of things I am interested in, like the cpu sizing tool I wrote http://ewams.net/specintd/ or web scraping, security, data integrity, etc. Just something to store my research in really.

Just get started!

Only if you want your professional interests to be separate.

Just have one web page dedicated to your tech portfolio, and another web page dedicated to music. Or even a whole section of your website.

Or have two separate websites hosted on the same IP address or not.

Personally I prefer PHP and using includes for menus, footers, or sidebars.

I use a static site generator called Hugo. All my web pages are markdown and Hugo turns them into HTML and applies a theme I chose. Great for if the content on your site is all static.

umvirate.com

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