About...

Jamie

Professionally, I'm a web developer, focusing on PHP & more specifically, WordPress. Currently, I work for Boston University, as a Senior Technologist for Development for the Interactive Design group. That's my title, but really I'm just a senior level developer with a handful more responsibilities. The schools and colleges that want a more customized touch come to us.

I'm also an amateur couch potato (that's only because I'm not paid for it). TV and movies have been my escape from reality for as long as I can remember. I used to think this was a bad thing, and something I should be embarrased about. I've just turned 50, and run out of fucks to give.

This site

I'm writing this blog mostly to get out of my head. In order to do that, I wanted to find the lowest barrier to entry. I use WordPress in my day job, and in my professional opinion, it would have been overkill for this little, tiny site.

How it is currently set up:

I've written up the structure of the site in Hirozed dot me is PHP. No generator, no markdown, just old school html with some PHP processing to help out.

I use watchexec, a Rust app that will watch changes on certain files and execute (get it?) a command. In this case, when an html, php, or css file is updated, it rsync to my dev or production server.

I wanted a little more of a styling head start, so I added simplecss. This will give me a head start on some other styling tweaks I want to make.

I decided to host on Nearly Free Speech. I could have used Netlify, or whip up a DigitalOcean droplet, but Nearly Free Speech is a decent middle of the road. I only pay for the bandwidth I use, and don't have to worry about a cap. SSH/SFTP access allows me to rsync the static files up. If all goes well, I'm prolly going to move my .com site over from Netlify.

What I'm going to write

If you made it this far down the page, you must really be interested in what I have to say. I don't want you to get your hopes up, but there won't be any deep insight in the inner workings of WordPress, or how to rewire your site for maximum performance, take a look at blog.hirozed.com for those engaging articles. There aren't a lot, so it'll be a quick read.

What I am going to write is whatever the hell I want to. It might be on the techie side, but mostly it'll be rants and navel-gazing, probably some tv and movie stuff. It might be a lot of posts, it might be once in a blue moon. I guess we'll find out.

What I used previously:

I've been following Bradley Taunt on Fosstodon, and watching his evolution of the blogging tools he uses. His latest (as of writing this Jan 2023) is barf (Blogs Are Really Fun). The simplicity of a shell script, a couple html files, and all the markdown I can handle.