Earlier this week I hacked together a proof of concept of a new sort of personal bio site at brianjon.es. The idea is that it is a single-page, business-card-style short biography site, but one that has a history. Visitors will see a short paragraph or two about what I’m doing at the moment, but will also be able to click back in time to see previous iterations of the same message. That’s it.
The site is built on Jekyll with some customizations to implement the history browsing and to suppress some of Jekyll’s assumptions regarding content as ‘posts’. In my design, posts are not units of different content but past iterations of the same content. In fact, when displaying a past bio, whatever the current version of my bio is appears beneath it for comparison.
My hope is that this archival feature will encourage me to update the page more frequently, that the knowledge that pushing an update will not remove the old information will free me to treat the space a little bit less preciously. I am also looking forward to trying to formalize the behavior in the form of a Jekyll plugin so that it might be reused and expanded on by others.
