Adarshnet sprang out of a couple of different prompts I was thinking about.
Personal websites on the internet are a misnomer. They are not truly personal, in the way a journal is. They are made for other people to look at.
What would a personal website look like if it was only meant for your own eyes?
Designers at companies try to think on my behalf. What goal is my user trying to achieve and how can I help them achieve it with the product my company is building for them?
But... I’m a designer myself. Why do I need an intermediary? What if I was incharge of trying to build software for myself?
What would a website need to have or be for me to want to visit it everyday?
A decade ago, the desktop used to be my home on the computer. But with the internet’s ubiquitousness today, that is no longer true.
What is my home on the internet? The browser? Ew.
I started trying to answer these by creating my own home on the internet from where I would start my journey each day.
I’ll actually jump straight into what it looks like today.
This is the first website that opens up when I open my computer each morning.
Let me give you a quick tour.
There’s a place for me to remind myself of what’s currently Top of Mind for me. I can update this whenever there's a change.
I’m trying to be more intentional about improving my vocabulary so I integrated a spaced repetition practice into Adarshnet.
For the longest time after I stopped actively using Facebook, I would still visit it to see if it was anybody's birthday.
I integrated the birthdays of people that I want to remember into Adarshnet so that they show up on the home-page.
- A place to set intentions for my day
- A place to store to-do-list type tasks
- A place to jot down quick thoughts I have
- A place to store quotes
- A reading inbox
- A checkout list
.. and I keep adding to it every other week.
But I'm not trying to give you a laundry list of everything that Adarshnet does for me, but to share the idea of making a truly-personal website.
What would the equivalent of Adarshnet look like for you?
Adarshnet allows me to experiment with random ideas that seem promising. For example,
Reading Inbox. I don’t want it distracting me when I’m working. So I have the unread dot only show up in the evenings when I want to nudge myself to check it out.
I'm excited to find out. How would Adarshnet change when I start working again. I imagine, it would be more.. entertainment focused? After a long day at work, perhaps I might want to just kick back and chill a little.
It’s been extremely rewarding working on this so far.
I really like the idea of having a piece of software on the side that is truly my own. That I can tinker with, over long periods of time, to achieve my own goals.
I will probably end up using this... forever?