I would be remiss if I didn’t start this blog by commenting on the incredibly useful services that allow you to see this page (and which you may want to use if setting up a site, yourself).

• We registered the domain with DomainInvestigator. They’ve been my primary registrar for many of sites over the last 5 years. They have decent technical support, good domain administration tools, and excellent pricing.
• This site is hosted with pair Networks. Pair isn’t just a great host; it’s a great company. The web hosting industry is overrun with horrible companies that are only surviving because of the huge demand for web real estate, and customers who don’t realize their host isn’t supposed to go down from time to time. If you want to host a web site, you want to host with pair. They offer: insanely reliable service; incredibly knowledgeable, fast and efficient phone and email support; very good pricing (incredible pricing, considering what you get); and they only run freeBSD UNIX, so security isn’t nearly the big issue it is, as when your host chooses to run Windows.
• And the entries you are seeing were all entered, managed, sorted and displayed using WordPress. Their claim of a ‘5-Minute’ install is entirely true! And it’s only taken me about 30 minutes to get this first post live (which included time playing with slogans, titling, colours, setting up users, learning the WordPress interface, and actually writing this post).

One of the hats I wear is as software engineer for the Mac and a variety of web technologies. The first two recommendations above come from years of professional experience with several different providers. But I settled on WordPress after about 10 minutes of research. I had heard it was good, checked it out, and found it was very good. We’ll see if it trips me up over time, but so far it’s been fast and easy!

We’re still using WordPress templates for the site. There will likely be many style changes over the next few months but we really wanted to start documenting our process (we’re already months behind).

More information about how we got here, philosophically, is available in the ‘About’ section on the right.

[Edit (Nov. 18, 2006): It’s now on the left.]