An Online Identity Crisis

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TLDR: I’m thinking of leaving this site up as business card and portfolio page and moving my blogging to pseudonymous site. Would appreciate it anyone else that’s done something similar would drop me an email with advice.

I like having a domain that’s my first and last name, which is one of the perks of having a relatively uncommon but still recognizable English first name and a fairly rare Polish last name. But, I feel like it’s an increasingly bad idea to have that domain be a catchall for everything about me.

It looks snazzy to direct a recruiter to derekkedziora.com/cv or derekkedziora.com/portfolio, but I don’t necessarily want that recruiter to be two or three clicks away from my thoughts about religion or my social views. To deal with this, I snapped up a €5 domain that’s perfect, uxcontent.design. But that defeats the whole purpose of separating these sites out — that adds an extra click or two to pop over to the search bar.

Self-censorship is another option, and it’s one that I’ve been doing a lot of lately. But that defeats the purpose of the indie web, which is to use this wonderful invention of the World Wide Web to find other weirdos, talk to one other, gently disagree, support each other, and simply see something that’s very human instead of the ugly corporate face of Facebook and Google.

And so what I’m leaning towards is switching my real blog to a pseudonym. Not that I’m planning to go to great lengths to hide my identity, I’d simply prefer my personal blog not be on the first page when searching for my full name. That way I can geek out to my heart’s content about pretty much anything, without it spilling into buckets of my life where it doesn’t belong.

This could fall in the old trope of having nothing to hide, and I really don’t have anything that genuinely must be hidden. But I’d rather introduce myself and share bits of my life to people at the tempo I’d like, rather than dumping everything all at once. Sort of like a nice chat over a cup of coffee is as far a first date really needs to go.