I thought I should write up a post about my intentions for my (relatively) new weblog. First, I should at least define what is a weblog. Dave Winer has a rather lengthy description of what encompasses the world of weblogs. Personally, I consider weblogs (blogs for short) to be an online diary of sorts, a way to share with the world (or a small group of friends and family) what is going on in your life, what you think about current events, and anything else you feel like writing about. Of course there are photoblogs that chronicle life through pictures, and I hope to get a new photo gallery setup in the near future to do just that.
How long have I been blogging?
Well, I’ve been making websites off and on for eight years now (I’m only 22), and several of my old sites dating back to 1999 included posts that I created by hand and manually updated the archives. I tried to update as often as I could, but as my computer science courses piled on work and I tried to escape the work, I stopped updating for a rather long time. Well, I’m back after graduating in May 2004 with my B.S. Computer Science degree and minor in Management Information Systems. I found a wonderful job in Fairfax, VA working for CGI-AMS as a J2EE software engineer (Disclaimer: This website contains the thoughts and views of David Schlosnagle, and does not represent the views of CGI-AMS). Unfortunately, it required me to move away from my friends in Pittsburgh, the place I’ve called home for 22 years (minus the 4 at PSU which is also part of my home). I found an nice 2 bedroom apartment about 5 minutes from work which I’m splitting with a friend from PSU.
What am I going to blog about?
If you want an idea what to expect in the future, take a look at the categories on the right. This is a list of possible topics I brainstormed, and generally relates to many of my interests.
As you probably figured out by my degree, I’m a geek, something I don’t consider a bad thing. I spend a fair amount of my day planted in front of a computer at work coding, and when I come home, I spend some of my time reading up on news online. Many times this is about technology and computer related articles, so if I find something interesting and feel that others might be interested in it as well, I’ll make a post for them.
One of my goals is to improve my writing abilities, and to do this I’m going to try to write longer entries similar to this. I enjoy bookmarking sites and articles that catch my attention, whether I agree with them or not. I will try to link to these in my posts so you can expand your knowledge a bit.
What are these comments and trackbacks?
These are a new edition to my site, thanks to finally using the “personal publishing platform” WordPress. Instead of manually updating and creating posts and archives, all of this is handled by WordPress, which is a wonderful little PHP/MySQL system for automating many of the things I used to do by hand. WordPress also adds many features I didn’t have before, namely comments and trackbacks. Comments allow anyone to leave their thoughts about my posts and create a discussion pertaining to the post. Trackbacks are similar, but allow readers with their own weblogs to create their own post and have it automatically link back to my post. I encourage everyone to post comments for any of my posts that have open feedback. (I do reserve the right to delete any comments that are totally off topic, such as SPAM) If you have any other thoughts or questions, feel free to email me (ds at david-s.net).
What is syndication?
Syndication is a way of subscribing to my weblog from a news reader that supports Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom feeds. These feeds are XML documents that the program can download and parse, showing you my most recent posts in the news reader, instead of having to visit the webpage. These programs allow you to read many different feeds very easily, creating a custom news paper of sorts, with information from the sources you choose. You can get all the sports, technology, business, and random opinions you want from all over the web. I have listed some of the popular news readers below if you want to check them out. I use NetNewsWire Lite, and Bloglines to keep my information thirst quenched.
- Mac OS X
- Windows
- Web Based (Universal)
Great job on the website. It is better than ever. Guess that money was well spent on PSU.
Comment by Mom — 7/4/2004 @ 11:57 am