Well, the last few weeks have proven a little hectic, and put the schedule off a bit, but I’m back to it and the ship should be righted soon. Having been away, I decided I wanted to really get some work done on this site to get things into a ‘not so embarrassed to show the public’ state. I think that’s taken care of now. Here’s what it took to get there:
1. Get an SSL certificate
I’m not going to pretend like I’m a wizard with this stuff, because I’m obviously not. I knew that I needed to get my site set up for https connections. Again, this was pretty easy to do with Namecheap. You just purchase an SSL certificate, use the cPanel to hook it into your domain, and voila! You are now considered reputable for some definition of reputable.
Pretty easy to get set up, but I have to admit I’m a little surprised at how much it cost. It’s only $10/year, but that seems kind of steep to me. That’s what I’m paying for hosting right now. Oh well, it’s not going to break the bank or anything, and it gives me and any potential readers some piece of mind that people aren’t sniffing traffic to the site. Don’t want the hackers to know you’re reading such subversive material.
2. Get the Basic Layout Put Together
If you’re on this site, it’s no secret to you that I’m not a design wizard. At the best of times I could be considered competent for an engineer. I have a pretty solid artistic bent, but it’s always been towards writing and music, not visual arts. So this is the part that takes the most work for me and yields the least results.
All said I think I have a decent set up going for the site. It’s just the default WordPress theme, admittedly, but it looks okay to me. I’ve got some pictures up that are something other than my beagle, which is an improvement, but I’d probably do well to get some better pictures as well as reduce the size somewhat. But for now they’ll do. They’ve got a little character, tell the reader a little bit about me, and let you put a face to the words.
Lastly, I’ve got the content structure set up for what I’m planning to use this site for. I’ve got the blog, a place to organize project specific details and personal and contact info set up. I should probably create a section for my resume now that I think about it, but that’s just going to take a few minutes to put together.
All in all I’m pretty happy with it. It was pretty intuitive to put together and now I’ve got my own little corner of the Internet dedicated to me. I have to admit I find the idea kind of thrilling and charming.
What’s Next?
So here we are: A nice simple site put together, and something I can check off of my to-do list. Not that work on the site is done by any means. Just off the top of my head, I can think of the following things the site would benefit from:
- Metrics: Has anybody other than me visited this site? Probably not, but if someone does, I want to catch them!
- Logging: I know logs are being kept in the background, but I’m not doing a damn thing with them. This is something I should put a little work into playing with. It could be a fun opportunity to write some python scripts to auto-generate reports for me.
- Layout Redisgn: The default template is okay, but really the site could benefit from a little TLC in the customization department. I need to have a decent way of in-lining pictures and all of that stuff too. I’m used to doing it in HTML with tables and other fun stuff, but I’m sure WordPress has an abstraction that makes all of that a lot easier.
- Pictures: Really I could use some better pictures. At least convert them to sepia so they’re properly serious…
- Project details: I need to start putting together project packets for each of the things I’m working on. It would be good to have a set format that’s some combination of design docs, source code, schematics / layout (when appropriate) and tests & characterization results.
Anyway, it’s just about at the point where I’d point to it on my resume, and might consider writing some technical articles that might appeal to a wider audience. I’ve got some ideas brewing for something like setting up an embedded development environment for programmers. I could probably get an article or two out of that at least.
Anyway, that wraps it up for today, just a quick check in to get the ball rolling again. I expect the next update will be something to do with FindFamiliar, and sometime soon I want to introduce my programmable keyboard. That should be a pretty fun project.