One more thing, and I may flesh this point out later but I just feel it's important to note, but your home node is yours and yours alone. That means you can put anything there, and no one can vote your node down or cause you undue pain about it. Recently I've noticed some people are unhappy about the fact that some graphic files are of questionable taste, but you don't have to worry about that if you're a newbie. I'm still at level five as of this writing and I can't put a picture up on my home node yet.

My point is though, if there are things which you find are downvoted and sent to your little corner of node heaven, and if that hasn't happened to you yet it will because that's a sort of inevitable rite of passage for hanging in E2, then if you want you can opt to copypaste an edited version of anything which the voters didn't like and put it on your homenode page. Or if there's stuff you'd like to write but you learn that such things get downvoted, you can put them on your home node. You can respond to "Getting To Know You" nodes at your homenode without any fear of reprisal. You can put node responses of any kind on your home node and link back to where you would have liked to put it. Or you can say your favorite catch phrases or make a statement about your personal beliefs and politics. Hate black people? By all means shout it to the rooftops on your home node. If I see a page that's blatantly racist I'll downvote it in a heartbeat, but on your homenode I can't do crap to you.

For the record, N-Wing has pointed out to me that "you can't downvote a user's homenode, but you can downvote their writeups. One shouldn't do that, though, but some do. :( So 'fear of reprisal' isn't perfectly correct." Granted all this is true, but I wouldn't want to give any mischievous noders out there any ideas, so let's pretend N-Wing didn't mention that. =)

The problem is, if you start adding stuff to your homenode regularly, you'll begin to notice that the one page gets pretty long pretty fast, and you'll wish you had more than one page. Man. If wishes were horses, eh? Also, no work on your homenode grants you any kind of XP with which to improve your Node-fu. However, as you slowly shake off the mantle of newbie like a snake sheds its skin, you will come to transcend XP and realize that it doesn't really mean anything in the long run.

Regardless of what you do in your home node, make it your own. Stretch out and make yourself at home. Put whatever you feel comfortable and whatever makes you feel comfortable because there are times when you're gonna have to frequent that page. Make it something of which you can personally be proud.

And don't worry if you screw it up because no one ever reads other people's Home Nodes anyway. j/k