A Fresh Start and a New Format
It has been quite some time since I last posted, but a recent email I received rejuvenated my interest in blogging. First - about this email. The letter was from Google notifying me of an important change to the Blogger platform. The basic message of the email can be foung here
Blogger Buzz. My old method of publication via sftp to my own personal domain will no longer be supported. I have two options. 1 - convert myself over to a blogger.com domain or 2 - I could choose to redirect my current website's DNS records to a Google server. That means when someone would go to http://blog.jlandis.org it would automatically redirect itself to one of Google's servers which would contain my website.
Now there is nothing terribly wrong with the second scenario, but I can be a bit possessive at times and I think that since I own jlandis.org I should have the right to keep my files stored on my domain and run them how I wanted them run. We could go into a brief discussion of conspiracy theories here about how Google is attempting to own all content on the web, but I'll spare that discussion. Blogger is Google's product and they can do with it what they want. They aren't charging me a fee, so I have no right to complain. This is what inspired me to create this new blog.
Far too often we find ourselves latching on and becoming dependent on other people's technologies and discoveries. We ourselves do not understand any of the underlying architecture, but we're more than happy to use the service. Personally I can't stand that. I want to be in a state of always learning and growing, so I decided to go and create my own blogging platform. I wrote 100% of the underlying code to this website. I crafted (albeit poorly) all of the graphics and design of this website. I wanted to understand how to do everything myself and in around 800 lines of code I discovered that I could do just that. Now the code might not be perfect and there may be a few bugs, but I would rather struggle and learn than just use someone else and their technology.
That is what this blog will be about - learning new things that we all take for granted. Posting may not be all that frequent, but I thought it would be a good idea to share some of my discoveries. These will not be new concepts, but through the process of my learning maybe I can help someone else learn something new. And if nothing else at least I'll have a record of my own personal growth.
JLandis (Thursday 25th of February 2010 12:16:15 PM)
©2010 blog.jlandis.org