Tools for the job

May 19, 2009 - Leave a Response

Today I have been thinking about a few things. Things that are not of massive consequence to my life, but would make it significantly better if I could/did implement them.

Mostly these things revolve around my passion/obsession/hobby of web “design”, development and writing. At the moment, if I am not at home, I don’t have adequate tools for writing or designing at all. The only tool I have is my iPhone, which is fine for writing shorter passages of work such as this, but is completely inadequate for any significant writing process.

What I am currently thinking would be the ideal set up would be to have a proper desktop computer at home, with plenty of processing power, and a nice, fast Internet connection for things such as dowloads, serious development work, and media storage. Whilst on the move, an ultra portable laptop or netbook with a 3G Internet connection (preferably on the Telstra NextG network) for writing, simple development, and occasional media use. The next level down in terms of gadgetry to make my life simpler is obviously the iPhone. This device is amazing for things such as a basic camera, texting, updating twitter, making calls, writing shorter entries that starting my netbook for would be pointless and of course media use actually on the go.

With the hardware aspect of this sorted out, I would then need to start looking at what Shawn Blanc calls “everything buckets”. Somewhere that I could store all of the data that I would be likely to need on the move, and be able to access it from anywhere, along with syncing those files across all the two computers so that at any given time, I can be sure that I have the most up to date version of any file on which I want to work.

I think that if I could afford, and did, implement these things I would never be caught with an idea that I want to put down, or start working on, and not be able to get a start on it because I didn’t have the tools at hand at the time.

Organising My Online Life

May 10, 2009 - Leave a Response

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about how best to organize and present myself online. This has been a part of my design process for what will become my new blog. I’ve come up with a plan that will bring everything together, and make my online presence coherent and managable.

Starting with my “hub” website – harris.tc. I will be setting up a permanent redirect to a sub-domain, namely dean.harris.tc and doing a redesign inspired by timvandamme.com with some jquery touches to the UI.

Rather than having my blog run on a sub-domain as I was planning, I have just bought a new domain that is a pretty sweet reflection of my personality, and I have some fun branding in mind. Details due to follow.

I’ve also decided to repurpose a domain I already own, where I used to blog, for a “lifestream” type site. This is pretty much a data convergence where I will pull all of the data from my online life into the one site and have ultimate control over how it is presented.

With that sorted out, now it’s time to find the time to do all the design work on all of these sites and get them imlemented.

Welcome (Again)

April 27, 2009 - Leave a Response

So, it looks like for the time being, I will be making do with a wordpress.com blog.

I have spent the last however long planning, designing, and halfway implementing my own, self-hosted installations of wordpress at various domains, and seem to have lost sight of why I was doing it. Ultimately the reason I got so caught up in what I was doing was so that I could have a place that I felt comfortable presenting what I write to anyone who cared to see it.

In the end, I got so caught up in the “design” and details of the site that I never actually wrote. I have decided that enough is enough, and that I will be writing here until I finish getting it up and online. I am sick of getting half to three quarters of the way there and throwing it all away, and not having somewhere to write.

With that in mind, my first post in quite some time is out of the way.

Welcome (again)

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