Officially Lucky

This post marks a very important point in time in my blogging career. I began what is now called “blogging” in April of 2001 with very basic posts like this one, about a month before the end of my sophomore year at Purdue. I was writing more for myself than anything else.

I had produced a series of websites on my personal web space during high school (1998-1999) and into my freshman year of college (1999-2000). Over the summer of 2000 when I was taking summer school at Purdue, I had began tinkering with Linux, PHP, MySQL, and making dynamic web pages. It was slow going at first, but I was able to produce basic things in short time. One of those things was a site where I could make basic posts. I did this because I had come to a conclusion that any website I could create would be worthless without regularly updated content.

Blogging had begun in earnest around 1997-1998, and no one told me. I didn’t get an inkling of all these people blogging until I had begun myself. There wasn’t an easy way to jack into the social conscious of all the smart, forward-thinking people online like there is today. So when blogging and RSS starting making peeps here in 2001 and 2002, I ramped up my activity on phaedo.cx. First by moving to MovableType 2.6 towards the middle of 2003 and to MovableType 3.0 after I graduated in 2004 only to update to Wordpress 1.2 in August of 2004.

It’s been a long and productive road over the past 3+ years with Wordpress & the past 6.7132 years at Phaedo.cx. I’ve finished 5 years of college, gotten two degrees, moved to Cincinnati and worked as an RF Engineer at T-Mobile, moved to Chicago to become a Web Developer at Stone Ward, and have begun a love affair with cooking.

I’ve become extremely involved with and a fan of Django and Python. I’ve lost a ton of weight and I am now an avid biker. I helped start the extremely popular journals at Ars Technica and I’ve traveled the country (mostly to San Francisco and back) to cover things like the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference and TechCrunch40.

I’ve been needing a a bit of rebranding for a while. I feel like my voice and goals aren’t very focused and I want to change that. So if you’re reading this post, it should be at my new blog’s domain, blog.clintecker.com and it is running on a custom blog written in Django and Python!

When I sat down to brainstorm about how I wanted to put the new site together, I briefly debated writing the whole thing from scratch. That’s a path I’ve been down before in PHP and something I know would take a while and probably not bear too much fruit. People have already done the hard work and with Django’s excellent pluggable application support, I was able to stand on the shoulders of giants and get down to the task of adding niche features that I required.

While there is at least one project called BlogMaker that puts it all together (pings, trackbacks, comments, spam filtering, et. cetera) and while I don’t want to do months of work, I want to tie a bunch of really good stuff I like together to get something unique to my needs.

So what I’ve done is take the blog application from Nathan Borror’s basic Django applications. This supports posts with categories, tags, comments, and markup. That’s an acceptable starting point in my mind. In fact, I was able to get this all installed, configured, running on my local machine, and composing this post within less than 15 minutes. Mostly that’s because I have a lot of experience with Django now and I knew I could just wire my urls.py to the built-in URL configuration in the blogging application which uses it’s own generic views. Presto, a basic blog!

Anyway, a lot of work still remains. I’ve made a list of the other things I want in my blog. I don’t really care for trackbacks, but I would like to ping ping-o-matic when I publish posts, integrate to some extent with Akismet for spam filtering, and introduce some method of registering for accounts/spam moderation.

Beyond the technical things I’d like to accomplish here, I’d like to introduce a new, very simple design using an established CSS framework and grid system (perhaps YUI, but I’ve been using Blueprint a bit at work lately). I want to integrate more of my online activities with my blog post. That means twitter, flickr, last.fm, Facebook, Google Reader shared items, and Google Notebook items (if possible).