The other day, I made myself a placeholder page. I’m not going to tell you the URL right here, as that would defeat the whole point: I bought the domain that is my first name plus my last name (dot com), and I put some content there so that that’s what would come up first when you google me. I don’t use my last name here on Doombot not because I want my involvement with this blog to be completely secret, but because I don’t want this to be what comes up when you google me. It’s all about impression management with potential employers, and I’ll be in career-mode as of this fall. Lacking the time to make myself a real professional home page, I threw up some text, a photo, and a link to a certain robot doodle—just enough for a personal touch, but not so much that it looks finished and I look like a crappy web designer.

Doing this has made me realized that making placeholder pages is probably my favorite type of web design. I know how stupid that sounds. I don’t care. There’s a certain pleasure in giving yourself a one-afternoon deadline and a simple goal, but still being determined to offer something worth glancing at briefly. Some of you may remember that Doombot itself was once only a placeholder page, which we considered more officially making a website of placeholder pages—see
this post, or at least this small excerpt:

We’ve had this domain name for a long time, and we haven’t done much with it. For a long time, we had an intentionally cryptic placeholder image with meaningless numbers. We discussed replacing that with an animated gif that said “Loading…” and had some equivalent of the animated spinning wheel. (Tony, who is more clever and evil than I am, suggested coding something in Flash for this that would display an actual loading bar that would have 99% as an asymptote that the bar would get infinitely close to but never reach.)

That cryptic placeholder page seems even more ominous after watching so much Lost. But I digress.

In retrospect, I think that a website that was just placeholder images could have been super awesome. I suppose we could have a “Placeholder of the Day” feature here like the Spam of the Day posts we occasionally write, but that seems less artful and clever than a website that is just a rotating gallery of placeholders, featuring one at a time. Well, we’ll see. In the meantime, perhaps I’ll just update my own placeholder page with a new robot doodle every now and then.