Those of you who already know me know that I’ve been working on the Internet for over 5 years now, and yet have never had what could be defined as a “proper” web site. By proper, I of course mean something other than a domain with a proper web host that was ostensibly serving as a glorified email host.
So this is it.
I have no true explanation for this that would satisfy any level of scrutiny, save perhaps laziness and ambivalence. So, with that being the case, and with me still being both lazy and ambivalent, why now?
Background
For those of you who don’t know me, some background and grounding, in the form of faux–executive bullet points:
- I’m Australian–born (Sydney, specifically), and emigrated to the United Kingdom (London, specifically) in early 2006.
- I’ve been working in the web industry as a developer since 2001–ish, initially doing various jobs for friends and friends–of–friends (as most of us have to when people find out you do “internet stuff”), and then for a Sydney–based agency. During my tenure there I worked on a number of small sites, and one particularly big speed dating site.
- On moving to London, my interest in web standards and accessibility fortuitously landed me a job as a web developer at Yahoo! Europe, where I worked until April this year. During my tenure there I was primarily assgned to Yahoo! Answers, which I was front–end lead on for 9 months, and before that Yahoo! Local Search.
- I now work at GCap Media (probably soon to be Global), who are a commercial radio company with interests in, among others, Capital FM, Classic FM, and XFM. They’re primarily a Django shop (at least now they are, should the wealth of ASP at the previously linked dissuade you of that idea), which might help to explain the choices made on this site.
The site itself
This site is, rather boringly, a standard blog format with a few exceptions: namely that there are no comments, and the software behind it has been written by myself.
No comments
This is partly by design, and partly attributable to laziness. Given that I’ve rolled this entire system myself, and I have an active interest in keeping spammers out of my website, I was toying with the idea of deferring the integration of comments until I had time to engineer them properly to help keep spam out (note that the existing Django contributed comment systems are really quite lacking in features compared to other systems, and thus were also unsuitable).
Two Tweets by my good friends and ex–colleagues Mike Davies and Mark Norman Francis convinced me (note that Mike’s updates are private and thus are not cited):
@intranation and to be honest, having your voice as part of the conversation is better than not. Comments are optional.
@intranation Do it. A blog is still a blog even if it doesn't have comments.
So, released without comments it is. I have vague plans to add comments with natural language CAPTCHAs and Akismet, but that’s on the back burner for the moment.
Hand–rolled
It was said by Dan Glegg (again, via Twitter) that:
Creating a forum or blog is the new "hello world" for application frameworks.
…and that’s exactly what I did (although I didn’t need Dan to tell me that).
For my new role at GCap I had to learn Django, and building my own site in it seemed the best way to unlearn 5+ years of commercial PHP experience in favour of Python and Django.
The future
So what do I intend to write about? Well, it’s my personal site so it’ll likey be topics I personally care about, with a slant towards technology stuff (since that’s the thing I probably have the most to offer the world, or at least I hope, since it’s what I do for a job).
Given the number of years I’ve not been posting, I rather curiously have the next few posts already lined up—they’re going to be about the software design choices I made, and the software I’ve used to build this site, since it’s likely a moderately uncommon set up (Django, Apache + mod_WSGI, Nginx, Capistrano, and Git). Hope to see you back here, if you’re not already bored.
PS
Notification via a feed is of course available (like any regular blog)—it’s Atom, and your (hopefully modern) browser should have auto–discovered it by now.
PPS
Also a big thanks to my ever–patient girlfriend Amanda, who has tolerated my over–engineering and complaining in the face of what turned out to be an incredibly tiny release.
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