New Site

Well, I finally got my act together and put together a website. I have a chronic problem of half-completing projects and then just leaving them languishing. I’m particularly bad with domain names — I get an idea for a site and snatch up some witty and apropos domain names… only to never fully develop the idea into a working site. Part of my problem is that I keep making my plans more and more intricate until it simply becomes impossible for my limited skill-set.

The impetus for this site is three-fold (and it therefore will have three sections once completed)...

  1. I wanted to create a decent gallery implementation that I can lock down to very private settings to allow my grandfather and his editor to view photos I took for his upcoming book about Mennonites in Paraguay. I don’t want to release the pictures into the open waters of the Internet as the publisher wouldn’t be very happy if they noticed some competitor using images earmarked for them in some other publication or whatnot. And I wanted a place to put my own personal pictures for the world to see. I think this site will address both of those needs… although the photos section of the site is still under development.
  2. I wanted to document some of the geeky tech-related projects on which I’m currently working. I personally rely very heavily on the internet for resources in developing some of these projects, and in some cases, internet documentation is very scarce. Recently, I’ve been learning Ruby and Rails and they have a great convention called DRY. I really think that it should be extended into a global version—if someone out there has accomplished the same goal you’re after, why should both parties need to develop the solution independently? Especially if it’s simply hobby projects. So, I’ll be putting stuff like that into the geeky section of things here. Expect to see stuff about PIC microcontrollers, SDCC, TextMate, Mac OS X, Ruby, Rails and Radiant. And maybe some other half-completed projects, too.
  3. While I was at it, I figured I may as well create a blog to comment on interesting stuff that happens to me during the day. I’m going to try to make it slightly more interesting than the majority of blahgs out there, but we’ll see how I do. First and foremost, I’m going to try to include photos or other such interesting visual with each post… that will help keep things moving at the least. And give me a reason to take out my camera for photos.

The one site-management package that I’ve found that can do all of the above and can gracefully mix and match them together is Radiant. It’s still fledgeling, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is shy about writing HTML/CSS or coding or working with the shell. It took a bit to get together, but I’m really enjoying it.

The sidebar is still under active development, and I’d like to get search and comments extensions going, too. And I’m still not too sure about the colors. I am slightly colorblind, but I’m trying to stay away from my “bad” colors. Let me know if you particularly like or dislike it… or if you simply can’t read things. Of course, until I get those comments going, you’ll just have to email me.

Posted by Matt on Saturday, May 12, 2007