Begin The Rambling

It has taken me forever and three days to get a website of some sort up and running, and finally I've done it.   I've had a desire to carve out my own corner in the internet for some time, but always something got in the way.

Back in college when I first got the idea that I had ideas, and maybe those ideas should be written down somewhere I wrote facebook notes, because back then facebook notes were all the rage.  They were easy, and people read them.  Hell, I knew a guy who wrote hundreds of facebook notes.  But all that was four or five years ago, which is a dynasty in computer years.  Now I don't even know how to find my old notes in facebook, let allow read anyone elses.

Of course facebook was great for internet word vomiting to your friends, acquaintances, and that cute person you met at that one bar/restaurant where you went to see that one band (you remember that one you even got a hug from them at the end of the night, and it like totally blew your mind).  Anyways, there was always a question of how to spread your electronic words out into people that you didn't even know yet.

Back in those days in the long long ago, you could use live journal.  I just couldn't get myself to do it.  The concept of my journal being alive scared the crap out of me.  I'm pretty sure that my journal coming alive would be a civilization ender, or at least a town eater.  Either way, I just wasn't that cool with the concept.

No, what I needed to do was make a blog.  Because when you have a blog, it is like having your own personal plane of existence, where you are God.  "Hey I don't like this background...." Bam it becomes My Little Pony background.  Of course this can cause some problems, viz. MySpace.

But let's be honest with each other here, being a God is hard.  There is a lot of creation, and CSS.  I mean once you have something you can improve on it and make it better, but making something from scratch takes effort.  That is why there are eleventy billion website tools to help you make the number one website to help you make money fast, or at least that is what I've been told.

When I was in college though I was an idealist.  I refused to work with those inferior systems with all their bloated javascript, and their extra page-loads.  I was going to create a sleek, slender, modern, minimal, awesome, functional, delicious, nonlinear, and static website for me to broadcast my ideas from the mountaintops of the internet.

It turns out that is a lot of work.  I never quite got there.  I always learned things, but I could never quite get something to ship.  Then I got a masters degree, and got a job.  Suddenly I had no time to worry about how awesome such a website would be, but I still had a strong desire to write.  And I felt that writing should be public, because public writing gets more criticism and makes me work at it more.  Even if no one reads it, the possibility that it might be read gives me that much more energy to review and reflect on it.

So after a year of working it over I decided to get a blogging engine.  I thought about tumblr, because it has so many awesome things, but it doesn't have a data export.  And kids these days, they just don't seem to care about vendor lock-in.   Wordpress is shiny, and has some export feature.  But blogger really seemed to have the administrative end well done, and it exports everything to an Atom feed, so in the end the choice was clear and the work only took a day.

I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to do with this website.  I've named it Programming Policy Philosophy, because those are the three things that seem to get me worked up.  However, it may just end up devolving into fart jokes and recycled cat macros.

Hey it was either this, or spamming everyone on Twitter.