About This Site

The Technology

The software powering this blog is not a masterwork. It's reliable, it's fairly fast, it's totally inflexible and it was written as an exercise to learn ASP.NET MVC and LINQ.

The source for the currently-running build will always be available here. It's not meant to be my example of the right way to do anything, especially a blog. It's mainly there so that a) if you're feeling generous, maybe you could poke around it and share your insights; and b) if someone can benefit from it, that's awesome.

I think it's a pretty good example of a domain-specific software project that meets requirements and was delivered on time and on budget. By domain-specific, I mean Rex Morgan Dot Net. You can learn more about it on the RexMorgan.Blog project page.

The Design

For this design, I was very influenced by the work of Dan Cederholm, Cameron Moll, and Jesse Benet-Chamberlain. I think often and hard about the wisdom of Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug and how it applies to the practical design problems I encounter in the real world. I am a firm believer that great usability and great design are not mutually exclusive. Good design is alot like good writing - remove every unnecessary element until there's nothing more to remove, and then you have a good design. I don't think this design is particularly great, so I won't pretend that it is. But every design element is deliberate and justifiable. I may write about this in detail at some point.

The Purpose

My site is first and foremost a journal/blog for my thoughts. “Thoughts” is very generic, but deliberately so. I don't want to pigeonhole myself or this site, since my interests are broad. In general, I think I have some things of value to say about the technology, business and state of the art of web design & development, so that is probably where I'll expend most of my words. In the last few years, I realized in a given week I might have half a dozen thoughts that, if I had a forum for articulating them, might have the potential to become fairly well developed. Although I've been told I am a good writer by people who generally know such things, I know from personal analysis that my written work tends to materialize in formations better suited to academic work than professional correspondence or casual composition. In the worst cases, that tendency can obfuscate my intended message. Most of the time, it just makes me a weighty read. I guess we'll see!