Choosing the site description (160 characters, hundreds of tries)
Right after losing a morning to the page title, I did the same thing all over again with the site's meta description. Same shape of problem, slightly bigger budget.
The constraint: under 160 characters
A meta description should stay under ~160 characters, or Google truncates it in the search snippet. That is a little more room than a tweet, which sounds generous until you try to say "who I am and what this whole site is" inside it.
The process: a four-model bake-off
I probably generated into the hundreds of suggestions across Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude. They each have a personality. ChatGPT came up with the best full sentences, but Gemini produced the best individual terms. So it turned into a back and forth of mixing ChatGPT's sentence structure with Gemini's word choices until the candidates actually sounded like me.
Once I had narrowed it down to a shortlist I liked, I asked Claude for its opinion and told it the first option was my favorite. Claude pushed back gently: it argued the second option (which had been sitting in the middle of my shortlist) was more connected to what I actually want this site to be. It laid out pros and cons for both.
I thought about it for a solid 30 long seconds 😁, read through the trade-offs, and went with the first one anyway. The second is a great line, but the first describes the site I am building today.
A note on per-page descriptions
After reading a bit about SEO, I know I will eventually have to write a good, distinct description for every post and page. That is the right thing to do. It is also really annoying, and it is firmly a future problem. My patience and enthusiasm for description-writing are completely depleted for now.
The shortlist
These were my preferred suggestions after all the back and forth with the AIs.
- A public workspace and personal knowledge base by Victor Santos, featuring software projects, technical posts, practical guides, and useful resources. ← chosen
- Victor Santos' public tech notebook: short notes on dev, apps, servers, and tools worth remembering, things I learn and want to keep, for me and for you. ← Claude's pick
- A public workspace and personal knowledge base by Victor Santos, featuring software projects, technical posts, practical guides, and engineering notes.
- A public workspace and personal knowledge base by Victor Santos, featuring projects, technical posts, practical guides, useful resources, and engineering notes.
- A public workspace and personal knowledge base by Victor Santos, featuring development projects, technical posts, practical guides, tips, and engineering notes.
- Victor Santos, backend-focused full-stack developer. A public workspace for open-source projects, technical posts, practical guides, and engineering notes.
- Victor Santos' developer hub: a curated knowledge base of open-source projects, technical posts, practical guides, and hands-on engineering notes.
- Victor Santos' personal knowledge base for development projects, technical posts, practical guides, useful resources, and hands-on engineering notes.
- Victor Santos' developer portfolio and knowledge base: open-source projects, technical writing, practical guides, and notes from across the web stack.
- A developer portfolio, public notebook, and knowledge base featuring Victor Santos' projects, technical posts, practical guides, and engineering notes.
- vss.dev is Victor Santos' developer hub: open-source projects, technical posts, practical guides, and engineering notes on web, cloud, and tooling.
- Victor Santos' public knowledge base. A collection of short notes on everything tech, from open-source projects and server maintenance to handy app suggestions.
- Victor Santos, full-stack web developer. vss.dev is a public workspace and knowledge base of short technical notes, app ideas, server tips, projects, and open-source work.
- vss.dev is Victor Santos' developer hub: a public notebook of technical posts, maintenance notes, project write-ups, and open-source projects worth remembering.
What I picked
Option 1: "A public workspace and personal knowledge base by Victor Santos, featuring software projects, technical posts, practical guides, and useful resources." It fits under 160 characters, leads with what the site is, and keeps my full name in for search. Keeping the rest of the shortlist here in case I want to revisit it.