First!

After working in IT for more than 10 years (if you count college), most of which was spent in web development, I have finally created a blog.

The Rationale

What is this blog all about? Well it is certainly going to have a technical slant to it, I work in IT and that is what I spend most of my days thinking about; however I do expect some non-technical things to creep in every now and again. From time to time I settle on a specific subject or idea and I feel compelled to start jotting things down on paper before the pictures fade away. This is not to say that the things I think about are particularly innovative or compelling but I definitely see a value in putting things down so that I can examine them later, even if it is just to look back and laugh.

The Motivation

What made me finally create a blog? In a word: Unemployment. In early 2008 I left my job to go work for a start-up company in the financial services industry. As it turns out 2008 was a bad year for the industry (especially for start-ups) so I was out of a Job by Christmas. This gave me an abundance of time to get up to speed with the latest and greatest in the tech world, but left me with no co-workers to share my theories with.

The Software

These days most people seem to be using Wordpress.org (software), Wordpress.com (hosted), Blogger (by Google) or Tumblr (if you are hip).

The non-hosted version of Wordpress was immediately ruled out because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of managing comment spam or software updates. Tumblr was ruled out because it requires a 3rd party just to enable commenting (I guess I am not hip).I ended up settling on Blogger because Wordpress.com doesn't let me use my own domain name unless I pay $10/yr (not much money, but it is still more of a hassle).

Getting started was pretty straight forward and the tools work pretty well. I think it is time Blogger did a redesign though (both in terms of templates and the overall site), Wordpress.com looks so much cleaner and more professional that I was seriously considering paying for it based on looks alone.