fine whine

I've removed the calendar from the top corner of this site. It's not because of all of the days (then weeks, then months) that passed without any new updates*. No, I've changed the software platform on which this is built yet again. I've been able to keep most of the look and feel the same, though no small effort of breaking and fixing the existing code both for the presentation (colors and graphics, etc) as well as actual bits of the software that I needed.

I'm now running Habari, an open-source blogging platform built from the ground up (not adapted or ported or forked like many of its predecessors) to be better. It's not a finished product by any stretch, but it's more than functional enough for me now, and, what's better, it's being actively developed by an accessible dev team. They already know me by name for all of my questions, suggestions, and bug reports, and soon I'll be contributing a plugin or two myself.

I was tempted to work backward, backdate some posts, and claim that database issues kept a few of the more recent updates (that is, anything after January) from showing up, but I'm going to be honest and just admit that I haven't been writing anything here.

So what's happened in the last four months? I left a contract position to work full-time for the State of Ohio as a Business Analyst. At least, that's my title - I'm still a ways from knowing exactly what that really means. I stay busy, though, and I like the people. I really like working in downtown Columbus - it's a big difference, now being able to eat lunch looking out from over thirty stories up, from the windowless cement bunker where previously I'd spent my meals. Being able to get out and still the city is also quite nice, and I've procured an inexpensive, pocket-size camera with which I've taken a few pictures around town. The good ones I've posted to Flickr. In fact, I've taken quite a few pictures recently, and I've been attempting to take at least one picture every day and post it.

Photos aren't the only things I've posted online. I've also been active with a so-called 'microblog' on Twitter, which is great for small updates, random questions, brief conversations, and a whole bunch of things I don't know how to do yet, or that need more people I know to be signed up to be useful. At some point I intend to better mesh those updates with the longer posts I put here, but until then you can find my most recent update here on this page in the upper right corner.

So now that I'm done fixing most of what was broken on the back-end, will I get back into the business of posting new stuff? Difficult to say. Right away I'm going to have a couple posts about some Habari plugins, and then after that, who knows?

* Well, not entirely at least. But it was a bit, well, disheartening to load the page and see that blank calendar all the time. Not disheartening enough to get me to load up the editor and write new stuff, of course, but pretty close.