A new start to old-fashioned posting.
In which I resurrect my blog for the 23rd year in a row, and go back to a '90s style of shorter posts about more specific subjects
#blogging #history #1990s #geocities #reddit #english #advice #language #esl #volunteer #tutor #coop #intentionalcommunity #qumbya #bowershouse #chicago #hydepark #wordpress #coding #design #frontend #php #css #style #styleguide
Back for a 23rd year! I first started my journal in 1998 on the ancient service Geocities, and it's existed in one form or another for over two decades since. I have a space set up for a brand-new personal website, over at jasonpettus.com, and I finally hope to get that set up and running later this summer and into this autumn; and at that point I plan on taking all 23 years of my journal archives and finally getting them imported into one central database, including all the old creative work I wrote in the '90s while being part of the poetry slam community.
Before that happens, though, I thought I'd get into a habit of posting regularly again, since I have this blog here at Write.as and all to do so. And, I've made the decision to go back to the kind of posting all of us were doing in the late '90s when blogs first became popular, which was shorter pieces that sometimes are no more than three or four paragraphs, thrown up onto the webpage multiple times a day whenever the mood strikes me, or at least once a day which is the rhythm I hope to get into this summer.
What will I post about? Well...
For starters, I've begun doing some volunteer work at Reddit, answering questions about English writing posed from students for whom English is a second language. Many of them turn out to be surprisingly fascinating, and I thought it'd be nice to share at least my particular answer with a larger public than just the Redditors there, so I'm starting up an “Ask An Editor” series here at the blog to occasionally share the more interesting questions and my particular response.
I'm finally getting to fully interact with the rest of my co-op in the way that I was always supposed to be able to, now that every person here has gotten through both their vaccination shots, so I find myself with a lot to share about that these days as well. Especially keep an eye on the fact that I have a community garden raised bed here at the house all to myself, for the first time in my life.
And I will probably blog about the process itself of setting up the new Wordpress site, over at jasonpettus.com. This will be the first time in years that I've directly interacted with code and design online; and I've got this really specific look and feel in mind, something really unique and that doesn't look like Every Other Wordpress Site That Exists, Ugh I Hate Them So Much, so I'm determined to go slowly, take my time, not get burned out or want to rush through half-assed, and emerge by Labor Day with a really sharp, memorably unique personal website, one where people can also directly hire me to do freelance editing work for their book, have a direct look at my schedule, etc. For those only joining in now who might not know, I actually attended a computer coding bootcamp in 2015; and while I never got a job out of it, for complicated reasons, I did at least learn the fundamentals of object-oriented programming pretty well (specifically through Ruby at the bootcamp), which makes the PHP Wordpress is built on top of fairly easy for me to work with as well. Now add that I've been a self-taught front-end designer for 24 years now (my personal site actually opened in 1997, one year before I decided to start journaling), and I've got just enough education and smarts to program my own theme and custom page design, complete with snippets. I find it all very interesting, so I'll probably journal about it here while I'm going through it.
Okay, so that's it for now. I'll be announcing new journal entries over at my Twitter account, for those who are over there too; or you can follow my main blog index page here at write.as/jasonpettus in your favorite news/feed reader. I look forward to joining you all a lot more often again.