General DAH on 05 Jul 2006 11:15 pm
Time for something new
I used to have a particular mindset when it came to anything related to technology, and computers and programming in general. If I want it, then i will do it myself. My reasoning was that it was a learning experience and more fun that way. Well, spending the past 10 months working with computers and programming as a day job have modified my thinking. For one, I no longer have vast amounts of free time to spend writing code and messing around with ideas. But most importantly I have come to understand that while it is helpful to do things yourself to learn the methods and ideas behind it, nothing beats using a widely accepted peice of opensource code to get things done. The benifit is not only standardization, but there is an active community behind it, and in the end you usually end up with something that looks much nicer, aka my website. i have been replacing, ever so slowly, parts of it with some opensource developed counterparts. I started with my photo gallery, and now i have replaced my blog. I figure not only does this one look nicer and support all the features i was planning to write into my own some day, but it ‘plays nicely’ with other blogging software out there.
So the lesson is, generally it is better to use standards, and if you want to ‘roll your own’, then become involved in an open source project. That is my plan. I hope to either start, or find, a decent project that i am interested in to help develop for others to use. I may wait till my skills have become more masterful to attempt something like that. otherwise I would feel like my contributions wouldn’t be that great.
A quick word about the new site. I forget how i set up the permissions for this thing. I think you can still comment anonymously, but if not then you might have to register, it should be painless. bye for now!
