Bremsstrahlung

So here we are, where by 'we' I mean me and any future reader. A weblog, that is, and it's something i never thought that I would have. Indeed, I doubt anyone else thinks I have one even now, so I write with the assumption that no one reads now, but that one day someone may. This comes to the point: Why do I want to write things here? basically I want a place where I can publicly express myself on whatever topic comes to mind, and perhaps eventually to give my friends a way to have some idea what I'm up to, should any of them ever find this. Because, despite my desire to communicate, I can't think of any good way to say, "Hey look! I've got a spot where I write stuff, you should read it periodically," especially when I haven't really written much yet.

Another major goal of this log is to allow me to crow about whatever passes for success in my personal projects, so I'll begin by saying: I built myself a weblog! It's a very simple little thing, but I'm proud because I assembled it myself from practically nothing. The only component which I just dropped in was PHP Markdown, a convenient implementation of the clever Mr. Gruber's markdown system. Other than that it consists of 2 little php scripts which I laboriously wrote (I'm rather a beginner at php, I fear) and the header image, which I made in Blender. It's very bare-bones but it appears to get the job done. (I do already see two little issues with it; it doesn't handle apostrophes correctly, and it uses the servers time to time-stamp posts, which I don't like because I'm a couple of time-zones away from the server.) It also lacks a few niceties like direct links to the first and most recent posts, but those will be simple to add.