Hello! ☞ This is an archived version of Al Shaw's personal website. The current site is http://shaw.al.
As I try to figure out what this site is, what it should be, and how it functions, I've been doing a little housekeeping to try to improve it. Yesterday I did some decluttering on the homepage. Hopefully it looks better.
The biggest challenge for me in building this site is really how to present the homepage--especially because I don't think of this site as a blog per se. If it's a blog at all, it's more of a "resublog" with gradual hits on what I'm working on (without the day-to-day minutia that we have come to expect as intrinsic to the idea of a blog proper). That's why I chose only to show a few posts on the homepage with no pagination and a minimal reference to the datestamp (which doubles as a permalink). Already in the scant few months this site has been active, my bio has become obsolete (now updated and taken off the homepage), and some of the posts near the bottom of this page have gotten a little stale, which begs the question of how to present information on the web that is not static, but not intensely frenetic. Nobody likes to stumble upon a blog that hasn't been updated for months. To mitigate that, I have split up information here into a two sections: "What I'm Working On" (quick hits about current projects) and The Portfolio, a static page of past projects. So far there hasn't been much overlap because all of the projects in The Portfolio predate the founding of this site, and therefore wouldn't have had the opportunity to be presented in the "blog." The thinking is, as things drift off the homepage, they'll both be in the archive, and bigger things will be added to the Portfolio as I move forward. WordPress is extremely flexible as a CMS, so I hope to clear up some of these presentation problems as the site grows.