Colophon
Hi, I’m Dean, and this is my weblogue.
I’m 24 25 years old, and live in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia with my beautiful girlfriend. I love design, although I suck at it. I love to write, and try to improve my writing each time I write. I have a baby niece who is probably the most gorgeous child I have ever met.
I wrote my first blog post sometime in 2004, although it has, thankfully, been lost to mists of time. I love to build websites. I try to write at least once or twice a week, although most things I write never make the transition from text file to blog post.
A little about the site
Publishing
This site is powered by the latest version of WordPress. Despite being a bloated, and increasingly complex blogging platform, WordPress performs admirably.
Plugins
The sheer number and quality of plugins available for WordPress are what keeps me using it. At the moment I am using the following plugins:
- Custom Query String Reloaded — allows the manipulation of query strings without writing it into my templates
- WP Extra Template Tags — Provided me with a few extra template tags I needed
- The All In One — I combined Post Count, Post Word Count, and Remove Pages From Search Results into a single, multipurpose plugin.
- Akismet — Protects me from spam comments
- WP No Category Base — Removes the requirement for “/category/” from your URLs
Writing
All posts begin life in WriteRoom, and then move into MarsEdit for editing, tagging, and publishing. MarsEdit is a wonderful product that could only be improved by having the ability to moderate comments, rather than having to log into WordPress itself to deal with those.
Design and Code
Designed by hand in Coda, and uploaded using the built in FTP client, the site is inspired by a number of my favourite blogs, if not to read, then to look at, including Linebreak, Spencer Fry and Shawn Blanc
Computing
As you might have noticed from the Mac only software mentioned above, I do all my computing on a bottom of the line 2009 (pre-late 2009 update) white MacBook. A gift from my amazing girlfriend, the only things I would change about it are the amount of RAM, and the size of the hard-drive. In all likelihood, neither will happen, and I’ll continue to bounce along with what I’ve got.
Elsewhere
I, like most geeks, spend a lot of time on the internet, and most of it using distributed services. You can follow me on Twitter, check out the very occasional photo on Flickr, and see what I’ve been listening to on Last.fm. There are a bunch more, but these are the ones I use most often.
