Streams of Consciousness

Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order.

Many of us are now rediscovering or reviving their personal sites, not only because the demise of Twitter has made it abundantly clear that we need to shift our attention away from large social media silos when we share our ideas, thoughts, and ramblings online. Our personal sites are the perfect home for all those personal bits and pieces. All those short and long-form posts, notes, thoughts, photos, links, but also just little things we notice in our world, things we learn, and things that excite us – they all belong on our personal websites first. So if you were asking yourself what you should post on your site, the correct answer is, of course, “everything you want”. Your personal site is your home on the Web. It is your playground but it is also a very subjective and individual account of all the things you think and care about. All the things that happen in your head. And on your home page, it can all come together in one large stream of different kinds of posts.

You could even think of this home stream as what in literature is called a “stream of consciousness”: a constant stream of the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of a narrator. Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self. In all its multitudes.

If you look at my home page, you can see that I haven’t yet turned it into a stream. It almost looks like I haven’t posted anything since 2019. This wasn’t a conscious decision and it is something that I am going to change in the process of redesigning my site this year. And I couldn’t agree more to what Jeremy wrote. If your home stream looks like a collection of posts that all look visually distinct, more “like a chaotic second-hand bookstore”, it will be much closer to who you and your unpolished stream of consciousness actually are. It will make your site more personal and, if you want future visitors to be able to tell the difference between you and an AI, more human.