I have been frustrated for years, that while I work in tech and software development, I have not made time for my own website. I have rotated through landing pages, half implemented (on my end) CMS frameworks, photo galleries, and other half-hearted attempts at a personal site.
A few years ago I was at Symfony Live in Portland and sat in on a presentation
from Beau Simensen about his new (at the time) php static site generator
Sculpin. I was familiar with other popular static site generators like
jekyll and Octopress. Octopress even falls into the category of half-hearted
attempts (again, on my end) I detailed above. I was impressed with Beau's work
and very interested in his project. Beau was using some Symfony components that
I was already familiar with, the http kernel and twig. I made a mental note
to take a look at Sculpin when I had some more time. Over the next few years I
downloaded Scuplin a couple of times, played with the code and blog template,
and then proceeded to not follow through with creating anything permanent.
Finally, this Spring, I decided that it was time to stop messing about and put forth a serious effort to build a blog for my personal domain. I looked at the current offerings of static content generators, considered Wordpress for a few minutes (I sometimes use Wordpress for organizations I do work for that have limited tech resources available to manage content), and decided I really liked what Scuplin offered.
Once I got started, things came together pretty fast. I upgraded the Scuplin blog template to the newest version of twitter bootstrap, pulled in the latest Font Awesome icon pack, and then started building out a layout based on some blog concepts and ideas I found around the web. UI design is not one of my strengths. However, I'm fairly pleased with how the theme came together. Next, I decided I really wanted as much of my web and social media content all in one place. I reviewed the Instagram and Twitter API docs, and then pulled my content into a couple of areas on this site. Twitter was super easy. Instagram required a few hurdles that seemed unnecessary to me, but hey, it works.
Now it's time to get busy creating some content. I figured this was a great time to roll out the traditional "Hello Word" first post and highlight some of the great tools I was able to use thanks to all the incredibly talented open source software developers around the world.
Welcome to my site and thanks for visiting.
