Your website is history

Everything you put on your website is old. Every website is an archive. The web is a collective history.

A tweet by Stephen Hay got me thinking about this subject. He pointed to a concept called a now page. The idea of a dedicated page on your website "that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life". "Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year."

When Dave Rupert posted his Vibe Check shortly after, it felt like further pressing the point. Webites tend to be about looking back.

• "Where have you been?"
• "What have you done?"
• "What have you achieved?"
• "What have you built?"

For somebody who likes to look forward, that feels really limited. My past shaped me, but it's not the entire story. So I'm thinking about creating a now page. There's a programmer inside me and the first question that pops up is, how can I structure this? How can I prevent repeating myself?

Don't Repeat Yourself

Making me write something again and again is a recipe for failure. I respect all people who write newsletters because it sounds like a terrible chore to me. The same goes to all people who create patreon-content on a schedule. I don't know how your brain works, but I assume mine doesn't work the same.

My website is currently static. It's not pulling in any information when you visit it. It could pull in information when publishing. Some things that I want to try:

• Most listened music from last.fm
• Recently read or currently reading
• Current LinkedIn headline
• Recent Twitter messages
• Maybe steps, weight or other health stats

The downside of these things is that they're mostly focussed on consumption. I don't want to be defined by what I consume. Something like solar panel power output would already be more interesting if you'd ask me. I'd like to add more focus on production like recent pictures, writing or projects.

To now and beyond?

But even if I post about my life every month or so. It feels like a step is missing. Past and present are not complete without the future. Before I start to build a /now/, I'm thinking of the next step.

• How can a website reflect a future?
• How do you present something digitally that hasn't even happened yet?

The image in my head currently is a sort of kanban-board with goals and how I'm progressing on them.

Working out in the open is fun. What I also like about this, is that I'd create a real log of my life. It touches the subject of lifelogging, and would turn this website into a documentary project for me.