Public gardens, secret routes

When you land on a site, you are treated with various hyperlinks. Based on the UX choices you make, you might end up preferring one over the other. You might get the job done, and head back to your earlier Chrome tab. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s an internet search as usual.

But what about those pages which have no visible links on the site you just searched. It’s hidden in plain sight, but still useful in certain contexts.

To give a direct example, I was having this huge creative tension on what I should keep on my personal website — should I be selling something? Pitching an idea? Or shrink myself into an entity valuable for corporates offering my skills? 

In Rob Hendle’s essay titled ‘I’m a Poem not a software’, he encounters a similar tension on the aspects of one’s personality that ought to be represented — as a personal site can be anything the person wants to be.

A personal website sits on the blurry line between a corporate entity and a skate park. Because a personal website has everything in its future; career connections and maybe weirdo web friends out there, potential ad money to be squeezed out of it or analytics to be siphoned. These constraints and incentives push our websites to be reserved or fabulous and there’s really no right answer here since a personal website can be anything we want it to be.

And in this blurry line between a corporate entity and a skate park, I decided that my site should be a more dignified version of a skate park where ideas could sprawl and run astray. But I still had a tight knot in my stomach to resolve this conflict — a way in which I could access some professional stuff such as cv, portfolio etc through hidden routes. 

In the context of websites, a ‘route’ refers to a specific URL path that corresponds to a page or resource on the site. It is part of the website’s structure, allowing users to navigate to different sections. So for instance, if you see the ‘now’ link on a site and click on that, you are taken to the site.com/now page. /now is a route of this page.

A hidden route refers to the ones that exist but are not displayed. Hidden routes are often used for purposes like private access, testing, or administrative functions and are not linked or visible in the site’s navigation. The easiest way to find these out is to check the website’s sitemap: Look for a sitemap.xml file, often found in the footer or robots.txt file, which lists all pages on the site. Another way is to examine the source code: right-click on the page and select “View Page Source” to look for hidden links in the HTML.

 A hidden route is public, but not public enough as it’s not visible.    Perfect use case for all the professional resources I want to make semi-public such as the routes— /cv, /portfolio, /work etc

In some sense, I’m intrigued by the concept of a public garden with secret routes. And these secret routes provide me with this malleability to communicate our personal/professional versions to the right audience through the means of a site.