Tracy Durnell published her principles for her website, which I thought was an interesting exercise in self-reflection, and it got me thinking about the principles that guide my own decisions for this website.
- Privacy first
- Accessible (by default)
- Be positive
- Don’t be a website about having a website
- Link generously
Privacy first
Everyone is entitled to privacy, and I respect that. I don’t use any client-side analytics libraries — self-hosted or otherwise. My server does keep logs, but at the moment I don’t even look at them.
Accessible (by default)
There is nothing of consequence on this website. Nonetheless I endeavor to make it accessible to everyone as a default experience regardless of device, user agent, or connection. You shouldn’t have to opt in to an accessible experience; if I design anything that violates WCAG that should be something you opt in to.
Be positive
Don’t start arguments. Don’t dump on things. Don’t just complain.
This was an interesting principle because I found it just sort of emerged over the years as I scrapped posts because I felt like the tone of the post was not the kind of thing I wanted on my site; usually when I was attempting to participate in The Discourse.
Don’t be a website about having a website
I love a good tech blog, and I love hearing about people’s processes, but these are topics on which I try to limit myself. I just don’t want this to be a website about having a website. This takes conscious effort on my part because my expertise, such as it is, is making websites.
This one is aspirational, considering that the two most common tags on this site are Web and Blogging. And this post isn’t really helping.
Link generously
Give credit where credit is due. Share the cool things other people are doing. One of the fun things about websites is discovering other websites via links.
“Link generously” is Tracy Durnell’s phrase; it’s part of her “be kind” principle. I think it’s a good phrase.