Hello, WordPress!

Four reasons why I’m excited to introduce a writing section on this website:

1. Perhaps now I’ll find my natural authorial voice.

I’ve already started and stopped a few different blogs. I tend to lose interest in trying to document my personal “remains of the day”; it’s all so much water under the bridge. And it’s too personal for what doubles as my professional presence on the Web. I think I’ll stick to themes that are more universally helpful, and see how it goes. I am excited by art, web design and hockey, so expect to see these themes fleshed out.

2. It’s powered by WordPress.

What an amazing piece of software! Actually, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a platform; a movement; a revolution; a brilliant exercise in human generosity and cooperation. Founding developer Matt Mullenweg earns major karma points, in my opinion, for steering its development and for releasing it to the public for the common good. Just think of the potential: people able to make a living setting up WordPress blogs; people using WordPress to power the websites of nonprofits and organizations poised to make the world a better place. About the project and its hard-won success, Mr. Mullenweg recently wrote:

Someday I think there will be a realization that the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

3. Search engine goodness

Just look at those clean, meaningful URLs! and thanks to plugins like Urban Giraffe’s HeadSpace2, custom per-post titles and meta tags! Since I already build sites using POSH methods (plus a little of my own secret sauce which I will reveal in a future post), I do fairly well in search engines. But until now my website has been more or less static; a portfolio of some of the creative work that I’ve done. I do use some hand-rolled content-management techniques (inspired by this article at a List Apart), but I don’t update the content frequently enough to encourage repeat visitors. Hopefully, writing a blog may change that.

4. I’ll sharpen my PHP and MySQL skills.

Practice makes perfect. Tinkering with and perfecting functions, includes, code and markup is a nutritious part of every web designer’s breakfast.

Posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 .