# An unfinished part of gomepage

7 Feb 2023, 11:00 PM

When I first started building gomepage, I structured it with three sections that I wanted to build out. For each section, I built a simple stub page, with the plan to add the real thing later. The sections are:

- Journal — a collection of articles, essays, and posts authored by me.
- Bookmarks — web pages I want to keep track of and share with others.
- Socials — other accounts of mine around the web.

The socials section was the easiest to build, being just one page, so I got that done first. It took me a while to get the journal started. For a long time I had thought it would be cool to blog a bit, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to share on here. I wrote my first post last September, just a recipe for how I like to make ramen. Then, in December, I started this writing challenge, and the rest is history.

So now, the only incomplete section of my site is the bookmarks page. Originally, I thought this would just be a simple listing of links I liked & wanted to share. I once tried to gather a list of links I would include from my browser bookmarks, but there weren’t really that many actually worth sharing.

Photo credit: Kavita Duhan

Around last December, I had an idea for how my bookmarks page could be more than just a list of links. The concept had actually been taking form for a while. Looking back through my notes just now, it looks like I had been recording some similar ideas as early as January of last year.

I would like to have something more like a set of personal encyclopedia entries on my favorite subjects. Each one would include external links to resources to learn more, but they would be tied together with my own words. It would be more friendly and easily navigated than a single wall of links, since I could contextualize each link. I also could link between related topics that I cover, creating a hypertext of my intersecting interests.

It seems to me that search engine quality has been steadily declining for a while now. In an internet where more and more content is becoming automated & commercialized, I think one way to fight the trend is for individuals to do their own indexing of the parts of the web that matter to them.

For those who encounter such resources, a good handmade index could be worth more than a hundred searches. And if enough of them pay it forward by linking back to what helped them, then over time, a decentralized network of resources can become a robust alternative to web search.

Do you have a website? Do you have a page of links or bookmarks? Are you dissatisfied with search engine results? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: `gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club`.