Purpose, Content, and Inspiration
This site was inspired by a number of bloggers, namely Jason Kottke. Like him, I discuss the projects I work on, thoughts on technology, some personal elements of my life (in short bursts or in longer pieces), along with reviewing movies I watch and books I read.
Note: Any opinions expressed on this site are my personal opinions, and not necessarily shared by my employer.
Building this site
I have built this site with WordPress, an open source blogging system that runs on the PHP scritping language and the MySQL database engine. I chose WordPress over making a CMS or using another one, mainly because its open source and has a variety of free themes and plugins. I am currently using the Thirty Ten theme and a few plugins to add features to the blog.
Some WordPress Plugins Used on this blog
- Advertising Manager- A great way to manage the advertising on your blog
- Akismet- Comment Spam Filtering
- Google Analyticator- For easy addition of Google Analytics code
- Google XML Sitemaps-Generates XML sitemaps for search engines
- Share This- Adds social bookmarking and emailing of posts. I like the presentation style it has over other similar plugins like Sociable or the Social Bookmark plugin
- Twitter Tools- Posts new blog entries to Twitter as well as a digest of your tweets.
- WordPress Database Backup- Schedule database backups or create on-the-fly backups.
- WordPress Mobile Edition- Creates a stripped down version for mobile phones and PDAs
- WP-Super Cache- Makes static pages for high-traffic blogs
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- Displays related entries of your blog posts
Recommended Themes
Other themes I have used in the past include Carrington, Cutline, and Hemingway. I’ve also used the K2 and Sandbox themes for other projects as well.
Hosting
This site is hosted by Dreamhost, a good, inexpensive web host.
Copyright
Unless otherwise stated, all content on this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which means you are free to take content from me and use it in any way you want (without fees), so long as I have a credit. As Lawrence Lessig said, “creativity builds on the past” and our current copyright system doesn’t allow that. By doing this, I can hopefully help with future creative efforts.
