New Hosting

After reading an article on Lifehacker, I decided to try and go 100% Google with my site. Ended up buying my domain name via Google Apps, also. Spent some time monkeying around with it's integration between all the different apps and thought it was all pretty neat. All you have to do is click on a button and it's all set up as if it were your own personal account. Cool.

Now comes the part where I start really trying to use it for the site. When I say for the site, I'm not referring to the back end organization part, but the actual content. This brings me to the Google Sites portion of the segment. For any person that at least knows what HTML is, Google Sites sucks. No dressing it up at all. It's just so basic, there really isn't much that you can do with it .. dynamically. It's more of a free and online version of a Google-like Frontpage or Word. Not quite sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. If all you want is some personal site that doesn't require doing much of anything, and you don't expect to get much, this is for you. The rest, don't go near it.

So until I get super famous, NearlyFreeSpeech is my new home. Considering this site will be for mainly for a place to learn while also displaying my resume, this is perfect. Don't have to pay much of anything, they support a good range of server-side scripting languages, and you have a good deal of control. At first, I was using this laptop for my own personal server. It was pretty nice, too. Except for when I moved from the Dallas/Fort Worth area to Nacogdoches. This place has nothing as far as technology goes. The internet is normally slow, and hosting is a nightmare. Everything put together, I'm happy with this decision.

While I thought about doing a Wordpress based site, think I'm going to go ahead and stick to doing it all myself. This is for learning purposes, after all. So I'm thinking it's a good time to actually do everything I've been thinking about it. The base of the site will be done either in Python or Ruby. May be in Ruby since I plan on a project or two being based on Rails. Until I fully decide, it will be in the basic HTML + Javascript/AJAX.

The beginning.

This blog is going to be pretty rough for a bit. Mainly just posting in order to get things set up and start getting ideas down. It'll be for the sole purpose for emptyserver activity. This will include my resume, projects and any of my attempts at being "professional".

In the (distant) past, I have used Emacs as my preferred editor for projects. More recently, I have used Vim. The main reasoning for this is due to the availability of the editor on just about every *nix-based system. Yes, I have attempted to play around with Eclipse, but it seems pretty bloated and doesn't really run smoothly on older machines. More specifically my current laptop. The only merit I see in using Eclipse would be the ADT plugin.  This brings me to CodeRun. It appears to be basic enough to run on all of my systems and it's available to any system with a web browser. Haven't used it much, yet, but will continue to add as I use it.

Currently, I decided to play around with Google Sites for my site. Immediately I regretted the decision. After realizing I needed to brush up on my javascript and AJAX, I decided to give it another go. So far I'm stuck. No clue how I want the bugger to look. That's why it's pretty much a bland main page with a default theme. Need to do some doodling and work something out. For this, I plan on using either Aviary or Photoshop. Why not Gimp? Trying my hardest to stay up in the clouds.

Went ahead and added the Blogger app to my Motorola Atrix. This way I can use this blog in order to get all my ideas online and in one spot.

Will add more later.