Gee, Think.

Blog Makeover

Revamping my blog will be my first ‘freelance’ project. I am going to spend some time to familiarize myself with the basics of wordpress themes, widgets, and plugins. Maybe in the future I will even contribute a plugin if I find gap in functionality that could use solving.  In any case, I think that focusing on my blog will be a good first step.

As a technology professional, people expect that you will have a personal website and that it will demonstrate some level of proficiency in technology.  Of course I don’t work specifically with web technology in my primary capacity, but many non-technical people might not understand the distinction between web based programming and enterprise programming.  So its time to get my ‘business card for the web’ up to par!

First Stop, Categories!

As part of my revamp, I decided that I needed to get my categories in order. The plugin BatchCat was a great help for that!  My reasoning behind this is that I want to present a clearly organized way for visitors to choose different topic areas.  Over the years, my blog has not been filtered or focused on one main topic.  I have tended to focus on one or two areas during each phase I went through, but in the end the posts have become a kind of roulette game.  You just don’t know what you’re going to get when you read the posts in chronological order.  This approach honored my inclination of the moment, but was a bit disorganized. I still want to present the multi-faceted person that I am through my blogging, but I want to produce a couple of ‘signals from the noise’ if you will.

I took the 30+ categories that I had created and decided that they could be trimmed down to five core interest areas:

• Professional,
• Personal,
• Health,
• Political, and
• Financial.

While each post might not fit perfectly into only one category, at least this will introduce a bit of discipline and allow me to focus on my target area without worrying about the way that the post might be seen in a different light.

Making yourself presentable

Is there something wrong with presenting ourselves in a certain way depending on the circumstances?  I think that some would say this is disingenuous, but that’s a bit negative.  It’s also only true if you are misrepresenting yourself.  A more positive description would be to say that it is simply focusing on the topic or situation at hand.  It’s possible to have a discussion on business without discussing politics and very often people advise that the two are kept separate.  The same is also said for the business and personal.  Viewed even another way, making good use of these categories will be just like dressing for the occasion.  You would choose different clothing for a formal meeting, interview, or presentation than you would for a casual dinner or hike in the woods.

Now that I have my philosophical justification for segregating my content, I’m going to go with a design of having one page per category.  Each page will display only posts from that category.  My goal is for each to be a distinct stream of posts.  I think the value here is that any one visitor to my site will be more likely to find more posts that appeal to our shared interests.  Delightfully, wordpress does not supply this arrangement out of the box.  Based on my first round of web searching, this takes a minor amount of custom coding to enable.  Maybe I could develop a theme that would incorporate “category pages” by default.

Importance of the personal

No matter how we might filter, limit, or select the traits that we overtly present in any given situation, we are always complete people.  My disposition is to be open to sharing the other aspects of my personality because I find that most people are looking for a little more personable interaction whether its at the office or at the checkout.  People want to connect on a personal level.  I think that we may spend most of our time interacting in contexts where the circumstances for connecting on a personal level are not available or we feel that it would be unexpected or perhaps unwelcome.  That’s unfortunate because it erodes each community’s sense of interconnectedness.  For that reason I always try to be ready to connect on a personal level.  It seemed only natural that my blog be a vehicle for that personal connection.

I have been focused for quite some time on programming exclusively in two languages, TCL (Tool Control Language) and a proprietary one that I shall not name. These have been the main areas that I have been required to understand for my day to day duties. Sure there is a little SQL and a little FIX protocol thrown in there from time to time, but TCL and the proprietary language are the main focus.

When I first learned to program I learned in Turbo Pascal. I was happy to have missed the regular Pascal because at 15 years of age I was ready for speed! Bring on the turbo! Turbo Pascal was quite a simple language, and that is where I developed my love for programming. Computer, you had me at “Hello, world!” I blazed through the class assignments. It was usually a race between myself and another student to see who could get through the assignment the fastest. It wasn’t long before I was spending time trying to customize and enhance the command line black jack program that we had written. There were menus, wagering, and more! The game was even good enough to attract the interest of my brother, who played it until he beat the million dollar prize limit.

I still can’t say exactly what it is that attracts me to programming. Is it the problem solving? Is it a sense of power in creating something that can operate without any further effort of my own? Does it satisfy some part of my ego to know that what I am contributing will be used over and over again by many people? I could list ideas like this on and on and on. When it comes down to it, I think that programming became a focal point for my curiosity and a source of analytical mental stimulation. I need something to be curious about, and I love to use my analytical mind. Sure there are many different ways to do this, and I have found my interests to be quite varied. Intellectually, programming is good fit for my disposition.

I remember when my cousin introduced me to creating web pages. He was living on his own in a humble apartment. This is where I learned about the linux operating system, the apache web server, HTML, and CSS. He hosted my first websites called “Gare Radio” and “Gare Records”. These websites served a few purposes for me. It was my first “Blog” before there were blogs. I would type in plaintext journal entries into a flat html file using the nano editor and manually create dividers between each entry. I think that LiveJournal may have cropped up around the same time, but blogging was nothing like was it is today. The website was both an outlet for my personal expression and reflection through journaling, and a place for me to experiment with HTML and CSS design ideas. It was a technical workshop or playground.

This time of experimentation was incredibly enjoyable. Shortly after creating the web page I enrolled as a student of Computer Science in New York State. During this time I was being exposed to many different programming languages and technologies. There was a lot of technical variety in my life. I would like to get back to this variety.

The internet has come a long way since the days that I was manually creating my webpage, but I think its time to get reacquainted. It’s hard to know where to start in getting reacquainted, but I think I’ll do what has served me well in other areas: find someone knowledgeable that is willing to share their experience and humbly become a diligent student of theirs.