Skip down to... History.

I started keeping a weblog in October of 2000, during my freshman year at NYU (and if you're wondering who "I" am, then go here). I was friendless, depressed, and -- unbelievably enough, in New York City -- bored, so I needed something to occupy my time; and at the same time, I figured I could hone my writing and web-design skills. The blog was called "Not Enough Of Me," after a brilliant line from Gavin Friday's "Caruso" --

Why do we need these pissy pop stars
When there's not enough of me?

For the first six months of its life, it was hosted at Geocities, and for the first four, I was updating it manually -- in February, I finally began using Blogger. On April 1st, 2001, I made the plunge and bought a domain name -- doyoufeelloved.com -- and moved the blog off of Geocities, renaming it "Do You Feel Loved?" in the process. This, of course, is a song on the U2 album Pop, which is massively underrated, but that's a rant I've already written. In September of 2002, I switched from Blogger to Movable Type, which was much more flexible and laid the groundwork for the blog you see now. In March 2003, I relaunched the site after a period of, shall we say "creative infertility," and configured it as you see now -- re-instating the "Not Enough Of Me" title for personal journal-entry sort of writing, and introducing a photoblog, mediablog (after several abortive attempts earlier in the site's life), and a pure linkslog powered by my old friend Blogger. The sum of these parts is the blog known as "Do You Feel Loved?"

Navigation / Explanations.

As you can gather from that short history lesson, the site wasn't always set up this way. Until March 2003, every post about every subject was lumped into one blog, which was called "Not Enough Of Me" for a few months and "Do You Feel Loved?" for the majority of its life. So, when reading the Archives from the period of October 2000 - February 2002, you should keep that in mind. Otherwise, I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to find your way around. The Archives page has more helpful hints for how to slog through the backlog of old posts, but remember that from any page on the site you can return to the main blog front-page by clicking "Weblog" on the top bar. The entire "blog" subdirectory has the same basic navigation menu up-top, so you should always be able to find your way home. The only exception would be on older archive pages generated by Blogger, but on those, you should generally be able to find the links back to the main blog page pretty easily.

Tech Specs.

This site is hosted by Dreamhost, who are a reasonably decent mid-price web-host with a decent range of options. Its update software is Movable Type and Blogger, both of which are free for personal users, so if you want to start a blog, there's nothing to it! Movable Type requires more web savvy than Blogger, which is essentially foolproof, so if you don't have any web space or HTML knowledge, then Blogger's the way to go. But if you do know what you're doing when it comes to coding for the web, Movable Type is an excellent tool.

All the code was written by me, by hand, meaning it's pretty messy and gross. I'm not exactly a new-media genius. It should work reasonably well in most browsers (as long as you've got a newer version with good CSS support), but I really can't make any promises... hopefully I'll get around to validating it all someday, but don't hold your breath. The current design was created with invaluable assistance from, and consultation by, Simon Pearson, and I ripped off the multi-blog format shamelessly from Prolific who continues to do it much better, and with more coding grace, than I could. We must strive to better our heroes, however.

The current design was built on Windows computers using nothing but Notepad, MSPaint, and Adobe Photoshop for the tricker graphics. Under normal circumstances it would be maintained on an Apple Powerbook G4, my personal computer, but I built the site while studying abroad without internet access on that machine. Ah well.

That's the long and short of it. If you've got any questions about how I did things on the site, go right ahead and e-mail me -- I'll try to be helpful. I hope you enjoy your visit to the site...