markhodson.nl is run by MarkHodson, who lives in the Netherlands. No, really.

The site is an unashamedly self-indulgent collection of bits and pieces that interest me. Or at least that interested me at the time I put them on the site… I hope that I can pass on some useful information together with my enthusiasm for the subjects. Feel free to contact me if you have comments or questions.

I've been running a personal website for about twenty years - see History of markhodson.nl -  starting out in the days when it was quite something to be online (are you old enough to remember Geocities?). I've provided web facilities for a number of clubs and voluntary organisations I've been involved with as well. It was useful at the time, but most of those have either run their course or found better solutions elsewhere by now.

These days, you could argue there isn't really much point in a personal site, since we have social media in all flavours and to suit all possible interests. And they often do a much better job than the personal website. I'm quite active on LibraryThing, for instance: there's a huge added value in interacting with hundreds of other book-lovers and taking advantage of the skill of some very clever programmers there. 

And the internet is becoming a much less friendly place than it was. I used to run a wiki-type site, but it became unsustainable due to the continuous attacks of commercial spammers. And another experimental site I'd completely forgotten about turned out to be running out of date software and was showing signs of "unusual activity", so it had to be disabled in a hurry. 

So why bother?

I don't know. Probably mainly because it's fun to play around with the tools from time to time and see how it all works. There's also the feeling of being in control of something: not a "user" but an "administrator", albeit in a small way. And it's nice to have your own personal domain name for email. I'd miss that, even if I now use gmail a lot of the time.

There's  a little ego-boost when someone says "I saw that on your website", too!