History
This is the Blog of Matthew Norconk. It is the most recent iteration of a series of web sites and blogs that have been in existence since my freshman year of college in 1999. The general time line is as follows:
Rev1 (1999-2004): I first created a static web site when learning HTML for a freshman job. I think I put more time into my web site than I did into the job. If you’ve ever read a page on designing pages that don’t suck, trust me, I violated every one of those rules. That’s OK though, the site was more a learning experience than a polished presentation of myself. There were various adjustments to this basic site over the next four years.
Rev 2 (2004 – 2007): During my first year of grad school, I was teaching CSE 101. Part of the class, which was new the year I started, was CSS based web design. Once again, I probably spent more time on my own than I did officially working. As a result, I became reasonably good at putting together CSS based web pages. I also ended up knowing CSS far better than average, and thus enjoyed that part of the teaching much more than most. My site gained much along the lines of design, but was still relatively static.
Rev2b (2004-2008): During this same time, I started messing with a livejournal account. Sacrificing freedom in presentation for ease of adding content. Admittedly, it started as a mockery of all things blog, but slowly morphed into a nice little forum for sharing things with friends who also used livejournal. These efforts went on in parallel for some time. The web site got used for pictures and the livejournal for all written content.
Rev3 (2005 – 2007): In the first few years after graduation it was a hope of mine to make a PHP driven front end to a SQL database. There were two issues to this: the time it would take to custom write all the PHP and my indecisiveness on how I wanted the site to look and how to design the database. I did briefly have a page available which pulled posts from a database and parsed directories for pictures. The problem was that I still didn’t have a quick and clean way to add content. That’s all of Rev3 that ever really saw the light of day.
Rev4 (2008 – ): I had been looking at freely available blog packages for some time. Over the last year or so I have installed WordPress and Joomla a couple times only to take issue with some thing or another. Lack of customization options was a big gripe. Lack of picture integration was another. Finally though, I’ve started to follow through on movign to wordpress. Ease of content addition will be on par with any hosted blog, and with plugins, I can keep the livejournal going as well.
Rev5 (future): This will be the integration of Gallery2 into my site. It is my understanding that there are weys to blend Gallery and WordPress which makes me very hopeful. The only concern I have is trying to maintain a consistent look and feel between the parts of my site.