Fourteen

I was recently musing about patterns of personal websites, and said, that some pages are so common that they deserve a treatement as phenomenon in their own right. I am not alone with that observation.

Ken Zinser calls them Cornerstones of your personal website, Robb Knight dubbed them Slash Pages. Let's compare notes.

Robb has collected 28 of them, even more when you also count synonyms. Ken has ten and four he considers not quite so common. I only named five: about, contact, now, projects, uses. Additionally I mentioned the venerable blogroll, although I didn't list it as one of those very common pages.

The intersection, where the shortness of my short list is the limiting factor, of these pages are: About, Blogroll, Contact, Now and Uses. The set-union is of course much larger. But in my personal judgement, some of the slashes are rather recent inventions, and not yet have picked up steam. But there is ample material for describing patterns of personal sites, using the cornerstones or slash-pages as starting point and asking: what common problem are they a solution for?