Gotta start somewhere

This is the start of a new site. Like a number folks I have worked with in the industry for many years, it often seems that one can do a lot of work around designing, developing, managing, consulting, optimizing – you name it – work with great websites, and have the darndest time creating and maintaining your own. A fine example of what they say about the cobbler’s children. In any event, having worked on a number of large and highly trafficed web sites over my 20+ year career, it always seemed the easiest to occasionally use my own site as a mere playground of semi- and moderately baked ideas which, while at times admirable, really only amounted to another sandbox, a poor neglected sandbox that would be difficult to visualize as a well crafted portfolio.

And that’s really what a vanity website really should be innit? A portfolio of the creator’s work whether they are a developer, a content [curator | builder | creator| etc.], an artist, an author, or any other type of professional seeking to carve out their identity on the web.

Early iterations of this in the late 90-2000’s era, I built this thing out of just straight up html/css/js; and it was arduous, even just building templates as a starting point. And then at some point, matters such as accessibility would start creeping in and it would be a good excuse to give up on the exercise. Then, as early CMSs became the norm, while developing and architecting sites for others, it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to stand up a Drupal instance, a pressflow instance, and later a wordpress instance and find that supporting custom theming and code on a vanity site seemed like an even more laborious exercise.

Eventually, I am coming back to a (hopefully) more rational process here after spending years building and optimizing sites for others, and understanding the DevOps layer of site construction a whole lot better. It’s like going from building individual homes to larger scale City/community planning and development.