It’s not in my nature to throw away work I have done. I still have archives of project folders that were set up in 1990 on my hard disk. You never know when you’re going to need a quick answer to a Borland C++ 4.0 question. My physical workshop looks a lot like my virtual one: dusty shelves; boxes piled high with old components. You never know when you’re going to need a modem, or a PS/2 to USB converter.

I mention these things to illustrate that today represents a significant departure for me. For a few years I maintained a blog at modalogica.com, and a personal page at markbetz.net. The framework for these pages was derived from PopForums, a forum platform for ASP.Net 1.1. I made a lot of modifications to it over time, including the blog pages, file libraries, and some other things. It worked very well, but as my kids grew along with my responsibilities I realized that I wanted to program and write, not spend my scarce programming time implementing features to support writing.

Another change for me has been my increasing use of Linux over the last year. I was never a Windows zealot, and I am not now an anti-Microsoft crusader of some kind. It’s just that I have had to use it for work, and it has turned out to be easier for some things that I have done here at home, too. The situation has evolved to the point where I have a sort of geeky crush on Debian, but I wouldn’t prescribe it to my mother for her daily use. When it works, it works really well. When it fails, it fails in spectacularly arcane ways that take a specialist spelunker of old forum posts to figure out.

These trends all lead to to today’s re-launch of my blog site running in WordPress on Linux. I’m pretty impressed with the platform so far, but will have much more to say on that later. Getting the content that I wanted out of the old blog has been painful, enough so that I have not brought everything, nor, for reasons of focus, will I. I intend this blog to be much more narrowly focused on programming, with a side dish of history, and occasional seasoning of games and literature.

I’ve spent about a week so far getting everything running the way I want it to, or pretty close. The theme is Paalam with a custom header image and some other small tweaks. In addition I am using NextGEN Gallery, and a few other widgets and plugins. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to add a lot of pictures and some of the files that I used to have linked on the old site. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what you find here. Drop me a comment if you have any suggestions.