Welcome to the new face of my website.
I'm a little pressed for time, so I'll refrain from writing some big eloquent presentation. Just a little history.
On August 27, 2003 I wrote my first blog entry. It was a difficult time of my life. I was unemployed, was wrestling with finances and trying to define my future acting career, my ongoing but languishing computer career, my nonexistent dating life and an unfinished masters degree whose timely expiration was hanging over my head.
I started doing what I've done naturally since I was ten years old: I began to write. The act was a therapeutic way to examine my life, and therein change it. It was also a way to add volumes of content to my website which had received a lot of work that Summer.
The end of 2003 was dramatic and eventful. I managed to join the Screen Actors Guild, of which I'm very proud. I defended my major paper (a level under a thesis) on the 11th hour and thus completed a long-abandoned master's degree. I also began a new political "career" with my sweeping enthusiasm for the Howard Dean campain. Finally, although I didn't write about it, I got through a tumultuous breakup with a very close and dear friend.
And at the end of it all I sort of burned out on writing about my life.
Really, that's an oversimplification. Many things happened that took priorities on my time. First and foremost, I got a new job. (Being a contractor, I actually got a new client, but I rarely can work for more than one client at a time because the work is so consuming.)
I also got extremely involved with the Stonewall Young Democrats, a fledgling group in Los Angeles that had just chartered and was trying to organize itself. After Howard Dean's sad downfall I was thrilled to have a better receptacle for my energies than the Kerry campaign. (Sorry, but I just don't like him all that well.) They approached me about creating a new website. I delivered a rather decent one within a week. Three months later it was already too old and decrepit so I made a new one from scratch.
The new website was based on the Movable Type blogging software. I realized that the new SYD (Stonewall Young Dems) website would need to be blog based using a powerful system that would allow many people to co-manage it, rather than allowing myself to become a bottleneck. I poured much of my heart and soul into creating a bunch of new content so we could unveil it as more than a "under construction" or "content coming soon!" sort of thing. I wrote a daily blog on my political views—something that had been happening anyway in the last active month of my own personal blog.
For the past four month I've avoided returning to my own website like I sometimes avoid cleaning my room/apartment. The mess just seems overwhelming and the first step is always the hardest to take.
It was also harder than "just starting to write again" on the old homepage because the system I had initially created was becoming too cumbersome. The iBlog application that I'd implemented as a means of trying and evaluating a piece of Mac software was just clunky and didn't handle blogging from multiple machines. Traveling home to Colorado or on the job to London made it just about impossible to use.
Once I got my experience with Movable Type and the SYD website, and once I realized how much fun I was having writing about things, it became obvious that I would have to install it on my own website and make the move. So far, installing the software and writing this first post (did I say it was going to be short?) has taken a little over an hour. Fiddling with the plumbing and getting it to go live should take about another thirty minutes.
And over the next several weeks I'll tweak the look and feel, although I've got to say I kinda like this really sparse, clean look. Okay, enough exposition! On with the show!
Posted by Admin at May 7, 2004 12:05 PM