If you are a digital creator on the web (designer, developer, etc.), building your own website continues to be an underrated way to learn skills and build your career.

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At the very least you should own a basic one page with your name, a photo, your background and links to any public profiles. I wouldn't stop there though.
My personal experience: designing, developing, and writing https://t.co/N3rFIlFkBs has continued to pay dividends. It got me every one of my jobs in the last 7 years, built me a reputation, introduced me to friends, helped me broaden my skillset, made me easier to find.
All the tools you need are free, well-designed and easy to get started with.
Designing a website is easier than ever thanks to free design tools like @figmadesign and the endless landscape of inspiration on @dribbble and @Behance
Building a website is easier than ever thanks to static site generators like @GatsbyJS, Nextjs @vercel , Hugo, Jeykyll, and css libraries like @tailwindcss.
Hosting used to be a big barrier to entry, but no longer is thanks to tools like @Netlify and @getRender. Simply connect a @github repo, and they will automatically detect your tools and starting hosting your site, keeping it up to date with your main branch.
With all these tools, as long as you get over your own perfectionism or fear of sharing something, you can quickly put something up on the web and unlock a lot of new fields to explore.
Explore visual design, front-end development, build tools, web performance, SEO, writing, photography, illustration, marketing, teaching, interviewing, integrations with tools like newsletter services like @ConvertKit , and @Mailchimp or search tools like @algolia.
On top of that, you can take everything you learn and use it in your day job or teach it to others.
Since it's your site, you can experiment and play in ways that may not be possible in a business context.
You gain empathy for other functions and learn their tools. Developers understanding designers, marketers understanding developers, etc.
If you haven't built and launched your own person website, blog, or portfolio, what's holding you back?

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x