Another blog. Do I really need another blog? Probably not. But, this community seems interesting so I'll try it out.
A little geek history for those who don't know me (which would be almost everyone). I've been running my own website since 1996 (which you can still find online if you use the wayback machine). Yes, that was on Geocities, but in my defense, it was before Yahoo bought them. I moved to my own domain in 1999, using the same name that I'd been using online since 1986. A primary focal point of any site I've ever run has been a weblog, even before anyone coined the term.
In late 2000, I found the site LiveJournal, which was started that year by Brad Fitzgerald. He created an interesting way to build a community, and it's been a very popular place for folks who like to talk. One of the things which LJ does that no other site I've seen has duplicated is the "Friends Page" - it's basically an RSS aggregator for other LJ users. Very slick. I embedded LJ into my main page for a couple years, until Brad's growing pains caused the site to be so flaky that I figured, "I'm paying for a host that has PHP and MySQL, why not use them?"
And thus was born my Movable Type experiment. That lasted for a while, and then MT became a bit too cranky about license agreements and I jumped to a true open-source platform, Wordpress. That's what I've stayed with since. We'll see what the future brings.
Which doesn't really explain what in the world I'm doing creating a blog on JoeUser, does it? There seem to be a few former korlings on here, which is cool. I'm willing to wander to multiple sites, while I know a lot of other folks are less adventurous. So, to help keep up connections with a subset of the group I hung out with for 12 years, I wander over here and read Sturgee every so often (even though I've added his RSS feed to my LJ Friends page as well). And then there's GreyWar, who I must have met at the Field Station but whose name escapes me. And the final thing which pushed me to actually create a blog here instead of just reading and posting in other ones, is because Dr. Guy suggested I write an article for the denizens of this demesne. So, I may get to that this weekend. Anything I post here will probably be crossposted from my main site, but I don't make any guarantees of completeness on any of my blatherings.