Brettia

Hi. If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of people that still visits this site. Probably you once had my Atom feed in your reader and you wondered why it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. My web host, Joyent, upgraded its servers, and the change in configuration broke my site. It wasn’t really a big deal; this blog, the only remotely active part of the site, had lain dormant for months, and much of the information on other pages was out of date. So rather than spend a few hours updating things and fixing the code that was no longer working, I decided it was time to start over. While I took pride in the fact that my site was completely powered by a CMS of my own design called Langosta, the code wasn’t the best and I could never really find time to add all the features I wanted.

So now I have a fresh installation of WordPress, and it does everything Langosta did and more. When I began writing Langosta in the summer of 2005, WordPress felt unpolished and immature, but it has evolved quite a bit since then. Plus, it has a huge user community and a variety of user-contributed plugins and themes. And, though I’d never used it myself, I’ve installed and customized WordPress for others a few times now, so I was more familiar with it than some of the alternatives, such as Movable Type. Obviously, the default theme leaves something to be desired, so I’ll be sure to change it as soon as I am able. For now though, I’m just happy to have something that works.

With the new CMS will come some changes to the content of this blog. Historically, it has been very me-focused, with a smattering of entries about philosophy or programming or events on the web. For the most part, I will continue to adhere to this formula. I know that most bloggers pick a particular subject to focus on, but I enjoy the freedom of being able to write about basically anything that comes to mind. However, I’ll make an effort to reduce the amount of “me entries” from 95% of the content to a less annoying 50%. I still think those entries are a valuable way to self-reflect, but I understand that they probably aren’t very useful to anyone else. I’ll also try to keep entries shorter and more focused.

Eventually, there will be more to this site than the blog. I plan on adding a link blog of some kind, a portfolio of my web design work, and perhaps a photo gallery. I also have some ideas for a new design that I may discuss in a later post. If all goes well, everything should be done by the end of January.

I’ll leave you with a list of upcoming entries to whet your appetite:

• An introduction, in which I describe myself (probably coming tonight or tomorrow)
• A review of Mac OS X and thoughts on my experience as a new Mac user
• A post about video games I play
• A post about my college experience thus far
• A discussion of the problems in the web development field
• A summary of my latest philosophical musings
• A very tearful postmortem for the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2007 season

Until next time….