Nathan at Work

As everybody knows the first post in a new blog should always form some kind of introduction; to the author, to the content, and more often than not some declaration of what one will be blogging about. Tradition dictates then that this should be mine.

Trouble is, when I write these things I get some kind of nagging feeling that in some way by writing down a short definition of myself, I will infact be defining myself; defining myself as in forming a binding contract between the descriptive words and my residual self image. Therefore it’s safe to assume that I’ll be finding this a virtually impossible task.

Come to think of it, I’ve created many personal site’s over the years, and I don’t think any of them have lasted more than a few weeks, to be honest the majority have never even made it as far as the internet.

Now I realise that this is due to numerous reasons, one though is that they all lacked the introduction, the binding contract, and thus they carried no weight with me; or with themselves. Moreover, this led to them missing the vital substance that gives meaning to the overall site and every sentence within, that ties one post to the next, convey’s personality; and ultimatly gives a site life.

Without this contract between author and blog it is doomed to become nothing more than an unloved and short lived collection of disjointed and seemingly random posts. [ subthought ]

I analyse everything, often make statements of thought as if they were fact and frequently my thoughts get side tracked into something possibly more interesting.

an irishman once said to Jeremy Clarkson:
“you are the only man I know who confuses his own opinion with fact..” – nice

After spending the past half hour writing this post I’ve already noted several things I don’t like about wordpress, or should I say several features I’d like to see implemented:

1. An easy way to make the home page only display posts from certain categories.
   I remember making a wordpress site last year that did just this, I’m sure one of the template tags can take include or maybe exclude (list)category-id to do this..
   @todo research and implement.
2. Sub-posts or notes on a post, little snippets that should not be in the main body but are visible / easily accessible and can be written in the same interface, snippets that give context to the text, or even off-topic tangents that could be viewed both seperately as posts and along side the post.
   @todo build the above
3. A button to insert a named anchor not just a hyperlink (old school wordage there)
   @todo don’t waste your time doing this
4. Some kind of javadoc style annotations to allow you to tag strings and format the dislpay of them differently.
   @example like this
   @todo perhaps quickly create a css style first
   @todo create a plugin for the above
   @todo fix ironic typo of the word display above
5. This “write” admin page should really be fluid instead of fixed width, I’m only using half of my nice new monitor here..
6. Being a blog it should really have an alternative journal or diary type view which shows all posts in ascending chronological order so you can read it like a conventional book rather than read it all backwards.
   @todo make this

I’m a developer who spends far too much time in work mode, analysing, thinking of ways to improve, making rash decisions to increase my personal workload to an unfeasible amount at every given opportunity, oh and I work at kraya.

It’s quite plain to see that I’m not really content with the functionality of wordpress or wordpress mu out of the box, so obviously you can assume that I really don’t like the standard templates that come with it; so dull, uninspiring and really a terrible use of space. I’d say the main priority is to get this thing looking more like I want it, or at least designed so that it efficiently displays the content it holds. Now I’m not a web designer but I do have a great interest in digital art, and after building several hundred websites over the past decade I’ve done a lot of GUI work so quite comfortable in this department.

@tangent
Over on shri’s blog he was discussing the fact that for many years he would make his desktop pure black and remove all icons from it, not only that but he’d also change his terminal windows so they were white on black, rather than the black on a white background linux default that so many stick with. I was rather pleased to read this, as snap – I’m the same and to this day have always ensured a white on black terminal (makes me feel comfortable, possibly from the msdos days or from having a permanent putty window open on my windows boxes so I feel reassuringly connected to a real os) and my destop is perma-black with a black theme to boot on all my systems. BTW Shri is my boss at kraya.

For now this blog is going to be all about improving this blog / wordpress by web development and design, perhaps in the future it’ll be more about projects at work, interesting tid-bits, links etc etc; but tbh (I say that a lot at the minute) most of those extra bit’s will probably be added as contexts to each post.

@context
While writing this post I’ve eaten 3 packets of chewits that I’d got for the kids because they are very more-ish, and listened to a little mix I did approximately 5 times on repeat, followed by a brilliant mix of my darlings (other half rachel) who’s a “proper” dj, with her own radio station and a lot of music based websites which I also do a lot of work on + look after the servers. It’s a friday night late on and just chilling at the end of the week. Rather.. (@todo insert a word more descriptive than good here) spending a bit of time relecting and planning, anything that gets or keeps you focussed or commited is always good.

I’m happily in a long term relationship, got X kids, an addictive personality (see chewits+song), an interest in all things creative including a lot of music, and as mentioned previously, tend to analyse everything often.

Should probably get on with this blog now.. *ponders if that constituted a binding introduction*

Oh and I’m Nathan. I write nath as i prefer how it looks on paper/screen but kind of frown at people when they call me nath out loud in real life..

last chewit gone, so finished.