When I launched the daily pointers back in 2000, every day brought an assortment of new personal (and other non-commercial) sites onto the web. Since that time, the number of sites going offline or stagnant has increased drastically while the number of new sites has similarly decreased. Needless to say, the original mission of the project has morphed into something quite different over time.

‘personal’ sites?

Links that aren‘t filtered in some way have limited value in my opinion. My choices to link to particular sites, simply put, are based on certain subjective criteria. You may choose to visit entirely different sites if your criteria are different and in that case, the usefulness of my links is probably quite limited to you. The world would be a boring place if we all liked exactly the same things and I realize that just few people might appreciate my pointers. It’s for those few people and myself that I even make the effort. My general criteria when I think of a ‘personal’ site include the following:

• The content is not commercial nor motivated by financial gain (though not necessarily personal content).
• Site is free of advertising and/or unexpected annoyances.
• Site is new or updates periodically or at least, has creative content worthy of a revisit.

Again, I should emphasize that this is all subjective. I never link to sites that I myself do not enjoy and in the cases where it matches for you, that’s great, and in any case, I’m always thankful for the diversity in thought and tastes in the world.

how the mission has changed

In the beginning, it was relatively easy to find many new sites and that was the project’s main focus. Relinking to sites was generally infrequent back then. Over time, the main focus has more become tracking which already-linked sites are still alive and updating while still keeping an eye open for new sites (which frankly, have become more difficult to find). This results in many cases of relinking to sites based on just how alive they still are.

why bother?

I do this for me. Keeping track of that part of the personal web which is still alive and thriving is both enjoyable and meaningful to me and should you derive a little enjoyment is the process, just color me tickled.