Hello and welcome to my latest website. If you have just happened upon this page, you may wonder why I am issuing a welcome statement when there are clearly a large number of articles that precede this one.
In fact, this site was created to store a number of things that were on my original site that were starting to seem out of place. My shaneycrawford.com site was launched in 2000 before the advent of sophisticated blogging and web design software for the average user. (It was originally coded by hand (html and css) and then later upgraded to php-based pmwiki software which is actually meant to be used to design wikis, but I find the interface really intuitive, so I decided to put it to use on my regular site).
When I started that site, I used it to post movie and book reviews, my resume, and other information about my work and leisure activities. However, I haven’t recently had the gumption to put up any more reviews (since about 2004) or any other “fun” things, so the parts of the site that contained my random musings was getting VERY dated. At first, I decided just to delete all of that content, but when I started reading it, I realized that it was still interesting — at least to me. It was just hosted in the wrong way. Rather than having it up on static pages where the fact that it was dated could not immediately be grasped by the user, I decided to put that content into a blog, where I could clearly mark the articles with a date to show when they were written. Old content is not bad, it just needs to be recognizable as old, otherwise it makes the site look out-of-date.
So, I started to move the content over to this space, just to test out this idea. However, once I got started, I realized that the reason that I wasn’t updating my original site with chatty stuff was because the interface did not make that an easy chore, nor did it showcase new material effectively. And that got me inspired not only to archive my old content, but also to start up a whole new blog where I could add chatty stuff more regularly. I have often thought about starting up new blogs on various issues, but I wondered whether I could chat about a single topic enough to fill a whole blog. The magic of the “Shaney Says…” site is that I don’t have to stick to one topic. I can talk about whatever I want and just categorize it for people to find later. Fun! (Okay, fun for me, probably not as exciting for you, but I hope you can come onboard anyway!)
Anyway, that is why this site is being graced with a “Welcome to…” post in the middle of its apparent existence. I hope you find this new site fun and informative. And please feel free to contact me if you have questions about anything that I have written.
