Welcome to the new site

Holy hell, I spent a lot of time making this website. I’m happy about how it has turned out, but I’m even more happy about the way that I’ve built it. For those of you nerds, allow me entertain you with the technical details.

I’ve built it on top of the Textpattern CMS. Textpattern is extremely flexible and allows you to structure your site any way you want. It has a great developer community a lot of really powerful plugins. Unfortunately, Textpattern has been stagnating for a few years. While tools like Tumblr and Wordpress have worked towards becoming more accessible, Textpattern has not, and so its community has not grown. This leads to a failure to draw support from web services. For example, Disqus offers first-class support for Wordpress, but relegates Textpattern users to figure it out for themselves with the “Universal” instructions. Because I’m a nerd, I can handle this, but not everyone can. Overall, I love the way Textpattern works, and I recommend it if you prize control above convenience.

On the front page, I’m using an app I wrote, called Gusher, to generate the news stream. I wrote it because I wanted to see what all the “activity” I was generating online really looked like. I know it’s anti-social, but there’s something soothing about being able to see it all isolated away from everybody else’s updates. I also learned a lot about writing more complex Javascript. I’m working on building it out into a service where anyone can make their own streams.

The site is hosted by WebFaction