Beginnings

» tagged as: personal » posted on Nov 07, 2010 at 18:46 PST » last updated on Feb 26, 2012 at 23:48 PST

Welcome to my new website and blog!

Who?

If you're reading this and don't know who I am, hi! Not entirely sure how you got here, but thanks for reading. Please check out the about page to learn more about me and why you may (or may not) care about what I have to say.

If you do know who I am, also hi! You're probably familiar with my propensity for rambling, but I promise I'll try to keep it short.

Why?

I've been writing HTML since 1994 but never had a serious, long lived personal website. Early on this was due to lack of interest, or lack of anything interesting to contribute. Later it was because I didn't have the time, and my desire to share quick snippets of my life was filled by Twitter.

However, at long last, here it is! Very small and sparse to begin with, but the heavy lifting of setting up a toolchain with which to present my thoughts is complete. All that's left is the hard part -- actually writing content.

What?

I have a handful of ideas floating around that I hope to blog about sometime. Unfortunately, they've been piling up for a couple of years and many are out of date or are no longer terribly unique. Even so, some of the highlights may be:

  • My experiences as an intermediate-to-advanced user of both Python and Ruby;
  • Why FOSS projects need to have documentation and not just a README + tests;
  • Comparing World of Warcraft to Lord of the Rings Online;
    • Nope, not everything's going to be tech related -- but you'll be able to subscribe to tech-only feeds, so don't worry!
  • Some similarities I noticed between the world-building/themes of the Myst games and the Amber series of novels;
  • Going over some of the tricks and tweaks I've added to my shell/editor/etc config files over the years;
  • My thoughts on the conflicting concerns at Web agencies which deal with multiple, varying backend platforms.

My interests do vary more than this list implies (though perhaps only slightly...) and there will doubtless be more random personal stuff as well -- travelogues, observations, poorly thought out political commentary, etc.

How?

More info about how I put this together and why I chose those particular pieces, can be found in the colophon, but suffice it to say that there's a decent amount of iterating left to do. I don't have any feeds up yet (though the functionality is already written), and the design -- such as it is -- could use some work.

Stay tuned

I took this website from mostly- to almost-entirely-done in a weekend, which is unusual for me: I'm lazy, and procrastinate a lot, so even with awesome tools I still don't get things done as fast as I'd like.

However, the entire reason I'm putting this up is to help turn over a new leaf in that regard. With luck, it'll work, and I'll be posting content regularly.

Thanks for reading!