Today I was re-working my “Internet Presence” and found out this is a “Thing” now? (IPM)
I had to chuckle when I discovered this because I first started registering domains for my IPM in May of 2002. At first it felt very narcissistic, but over time it became clear this was an investment in my career.
Sadly I’ve just not made the time to keep all of my various sites up to date, I do however want people to be able to find me and content related to companies and projects I’m involved in.
With this in mind I slowly worked my way around the Interwebs and found the various accounts I have and updated profiles, pictures and bios then pointed them all to my main domain. I then moved the domain to CloudFlare to manage DNS/Caching and some form of SSL (even if it’s not SSL end-to-end) and posted some hand-edited content on my Github Pages account.
I started to just flat out delete my wordpress account and then realized I should most likely keep it up, it’s part of my IPM strategy!
The part that struck me is how “Mandatory” all these things start to become, how if you want to rise above the noise on the Internet you need to develop your own strategies for SEO, IPM, OPM and whatever they’ll call it next. In today’s world these things are akin to Dress For Success. If you want to stand out in the digital world you have to carefully weave your own web of content and ways to enter that web from various “well known” portals and tools like search engines.
On top of this all the rage now a days amongst nerds is the “Generated Static Web Page” using tools like Jekyll all the design and content is created somewhere else, rendered to static pages to be served from a cheap/free/fast web hosting system.
Several years ago I was on a team managing a large family of sites that were using Drupal to pull content from the database and render it to users as they visited the site. Often times when things got too busy we would deploy tools like Boost to get the site loading quicker. Basically creating a semi-static version of the site to reduce load on our web servers.
What strikes me here is the pendulum of time, my first site was 100% hand coded in 1997. Next we had 100% dynamic sites and now we swing back to static sites, but generated with tools. We started with Dress for Success and now we have IPM. Where will the pendulum of time swing to next? I think we will see a future where physical and virtual merge into a seamless mesh of real and virtual content, navigating from one to the other will be as simple as walking through a door or stepping onto an elevator. Then again maybe I’ve watched The Matrix too many times.
Which pill will you take? Red or Blue?
-k
PS: If you’re interested in more recent ramblings from me try checking out my main site at www.karlbunch.com. Most likely this post is very old and there is a chance the main site will be old too, but that’s the challenge of balancing the virtual world against the real world. If I don’t eat in the real world the consequences are very clear, in the virtual world if I don’t update my sites, well, who knows what impact it has on me…
Karl's Mandatory Wordpress Page 