I started this weblog (what the hell's a weblog?) in October of 2000 during my freshman year at NYU. I'd been reading blogs for about a year before that and, frankly, I was bored and friendless in my dorm room and figured it'd be nice to teach myself some more HTML and to make myself write a bit more regularly. Five years later I've done both of those things, though looking back I could've done a better job of both. Regrets, I've had a few, but don't we all?
Over the years, I've done a lot of redesigning and mucking-about with the place, so sometimes things get a little bit hard to follow. There's a full explanation on the Archives page, but suffice it to say, occasionally I thought it was a good idea to split certain parts of the blog off into their own little component blogs, which I fed into the site in a variety of clumsy and confusing ways -- there have been separate linkslogs, a separate photoblog, and even a separate blog for writing about my media intake at various points throughout the site's lifetime. Nowadays I do everything in one place, using nothing but a bit of clever CSS formatting to keep posts with different themes (namely, long-form and short-form) separated. God knows that eventually I might find some reason why that system is stupid, and in replacing it I'll add another layer of complication to this tangled mess. But for now, I think it's working out just fine.
Technical Mumbo-Jumbo.This site is optimized for viewing in 1024x768 resolution. If you're using 800x600, then you may have left-right scrollbars at the bottom of your browser window -- I apologize, but you shouldn't really have to scroll to see any of the content. I recommend viewing the site in Firefox and Safari, two distinctly excellent browsers that are more powerful, more standards-compliant, and more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you're viewing this site in that browser, then I apologize, and I don't know quite why you're doing it when there are better, simpler, safer free tools out there. It should look tolerable for you, if not perfect -- I spent some time troubleshooting it, but if you run into any major bugs or ugliness, let me know. (And if you're using a particularly old version of any browser, this site looks just plain rotten. What can I say to that except that you should probably upgrade? There are plenty of benefits to doing so, even when you put my dumb little website aside.)
I maintain this mess on an Apple Powerbook G4 from the spring of 2002, which, despite being the sexiest computer I've ever owned (I'm a total Mac geek, deal with it -- I won't ever buy another Windows PC if I can help it), seems pitiably out of date now. The current design was created with the invaluable help and suggestions of Tom Armitage, Lia Bulaong, and readers like you, and the various tools and technologies which power it include Movable Type, Flickr, Audioscrobbler, MT-Blacklist, SubEthaEdit, Cyberduck, and Dreamhost.
On the subject of standards-compliance, the CSS validates, and as far as I'm concerned, the XHTML does too -- though if you click that link you'll see that strictly speaking it doesn't. That's a result of the external code that I've included in the template from Flickr and the iTunes Linkmaker, and sadly there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. All of the code I wrote for the weblog frontpage validates, and hopefully I'll get around to making sure that most of the other pages do too. It all depends on how bored I get on the weekends.
Oh, and if you're wondering who this first person "I" is, then you should read this page's sidebar (if you haven't already), or taxi directly to the detailed biography.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you get something out of the time you spend here -- it'd be nice to think that I'm pleasing somebody other than myself by cluttering up the web a tiny bit more.