New Year's Resolutions

Pardon our dust

One of my upcoming New Year’s Resolutions for 2011 is to get my websites in order. Since I wish to use fairly basic web site creation and management tools I was disappointed that Apple didn’t show iWeb any love in the iLife ’11 release and that there is no assurance that we’ll soon see an iPad version like we have for members of the iWork suite. So I’m giving RapidWeaver 5.0 a go over the next few weeks since I’ll have the advantage of riding on my wife’s coattails as she learns if it works well for her sites.

As a programmer it is my conscious choice to learn only a smattering of Apache, CGI, Perl, PHP, HTML and CSS. Even to learn a passing “good parts” bit of Javascript is an iffy proposition for a middle-aged hacker perpetually short on time and energy. Webpages, like software, tend to be very transient and ephemeral. For thirty-some years I’ve been perpetually discontented with the effort required to create, correct and change software even though I understand why is it such a difficult craft. The Web seems to have evolved in much the same way.

While during my decades tenure in programming we’ve seen the slow rise of visual IDEs as the dominant creation M.O., for Web content creation we’re recently seeing a neo-Cambrian explosion. As such, to communicate to you Web ala mode du jour I could be blogging, tweeting, updating Facebook, uploading to YouTube, Podcasting, Craigslisting, or even buying adwords and yet be considered very mainstream. Many times that number of content communication outlets currently exist, some of which are mainstreaming don’t-blink fast and others of which die a disused death before I even manage to have heard of them.

We live in interesting times.

I hope to see you on the other side.

- Dan