Hello! ☞ This is an archived version of Al Shaw's personal website. The current site is http://shaw.al.
As we speak, the DNS migration should be propagating throughout the net-- as of today, this weblog has a new design, a new host and a new CMS. Shhhaw 2.0 is running on Movable Type 4.261 on a hand-configured CentOS slice at Slicehost and is served up by Apache and PHP. The templates and CSS are also brand new. I've retired the old ITC Lubalin Graph wordmark in favor of H&FJ's Ziggurat Black Italic, with Underware's Unibody 8 Italic for the subhead. If I miss anything about WordPress, it won't be the query-stringed URLs. I've done my best to redirect as many as I could find to their new semantically-kosher counterparts, though please let me know if you find a straggler.
After working with MT nearly every day for over a year at TPM (and meeting many of its awesome creators), it feels good to bring my personal online presence into the fold. Outwardly, is there a difference between a WordPress blog, and an MT blog? Well, no. But, for me, two reasons prompted the switch: familiarity with the UI and templating language, and a desire for a sandbox to try out new things that could germinate into TPM projects. Byrne Reese's excellent handbook led me through the dark crevices of the MT installation process. There are a number of things I've been meaning to blog about that have been stymied with this transition, so hopefully the gears will start turning again.