Welcome to my new website. Shiny. This is the obligatory Hello World post.
First things first, please forgive the pretentious choice of TLD. The appeal of a firstname@lastname email address outweighed my reluctance to brand myself as a non-profit organisation.
My main goal here was to hand-code a website from scratch, without relying on a CMS, framework, template, or theme. WordPress is great and I use it daily, but when it’s necessary to tinker under the hood, I’m lost in loops and functions that I don’t understand or need. Here under my own roof, I intend to use only code I write myself, or - failing that - code I understand. For this reason, you can expect the doors to fall off fairly regularly.
For anyone thinking of trying something similar, I’d highly recommend it. Out of necessity, you’ll familiarize yourself with everything taken for granted when using a CMS. I’ve honed my web development skills, discovered new tooling (including CSS preprocessors like Sass), and also better understand the underlying principles behind responsive design and the semantic web. The result? Total control over a site purpose-built from the ground-up.
There’s still a long way to go, and plenty of functionality is still missing, so as such this site will be an ongoing project. Thanks to everyone who gave me pointers along the road to getting Bennet.org online.
My other motivation for creating this site was desire for my own platform. In the era of social media, thousands of streams of content vie for our time and attention, making for a perpetual tsunami of ‘newness’. Rather than try to compete, I’ve decided to take my lead from Frank Chimero and build my own house, so to speak:
Have you ever visited an architect’s house, one they designed themselves? It’s fun to walk through it with them. They have so many things, arranged so thoughtfully, and share the space with such pride because of the personal reflection the house required to design (not to mention the effort it took to build). It’s really quite special. I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once. In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best.
Both my full-time job and my freelance work involve writing, but here on my own turf I can write - with absolutely no guarantee of quality – about whatever I feel like.
As such, I would expect this blog to veer unsteadily from topic to topic, at least at first, as I find my feet. I intend to start with some long-form reviews and retrospectives of films and games, perhaps interspersed with the occasional technical how-to. On the other hand, all this may fail to materialise. We’ll see.
Thanks for dropping by. Happy 2014!