dustinfluke.com

I did it.

I finally decided to ditch the django blog for now and really get something going on the easier WordPress. There’s a few reasons for this:

1. I don’t have a job right now, and I feel that I need to re-establish some form of communication with a lot of people, but primarily former co-workers, whom I miss talking with. This blog (and rss feeds) is a way to keep tabs on each other without hanging out in an IRC channel all day not using my time to the full capacity.
2. I want to use my time more wisely, and when I write, I tend to remember more. I’ll likely blog about things going on at a given point in time if nothing more than to remember more clearly what it is I intend to do.
3. I have some upcoming projects I’ve previously announced, but never had the time to work on. I’ve established some unwritten goals for these things, and getting the blog up is the first step to the completion of those projects. (Then blog about those goals to get them written down) I want to be able to communicate progress, and I feel this is a good way to do that.
4. Twitter is only 140 characters, and so with that and Facebook, I hope to gain a following of sorts for reinforcement, ideas, networking, etc. A blog is a great platform for sharing lenghthier items.
5. It’s about time. I’ve let this site stagnate and go stale for the last 3 years or so, letting indecision get in my way of getting any real progress done. (WP or Django) Doing some self analysis in this “time between opportunities” has allowed me to see that I developed some pretty crippling habits. If you really want to know what they are, Laura can tell you. All of the self realization I’ve talked with her about she’s reinforced with a kind “Yep!” and smile. I’m glad she listens to me, even when she wants to get back to reading her vampire books she’s hooked on at the moment.
6. I already had a ton of contnet on wordpress and didn’t feel like converting it. Sure, I could start writing everything in reStructured text to be fully mobile across various platforms, but the fact is I know wordpress pretty well, and don’t feel now is the time to dive into python or django.
7. Lastly, whether it helps or not, maybe someday someone will go through a time in their life where they question thier purpose in life, the direction they want to go, where they feel they should be, etc. as I feel I am right now. If I blog a bit about it, perhaps that will inspire that person to look deeper at things. It’s a journey, and one I’m not sure of the destination of. I just know I have a unique purpose, for God intended it, and I plan to discover what that is. It might happen in two minutes, two hours, two days, or two decades. I have no idea, but it’s an area of focus for me now. I hope that by sharing, I can help someone else. It’s really that simple.

What you’ll notice is I’m using a stock theme. I have some other ideas on paper that I’ll implement over time, but I feel that since I have the content from archive, I only wrote 6 entries last year on the django blog, and I’d rather focus on writing content and doing some planning for other things and finding a job, I’ll worry about look and feel at a later point in time. I realized it just wansn’t all super important to me right now.

I’ll also be adding other features like my flickr stream, tweets, project pages, and other things as time allows. I just know if I try to do everything at once, I’ll fail.

Time to do some site changing and get this back on the proper dustinfluke.com domain.

I’m busy. Every day I see things I’d love to blog about, comment on, etc. but they usually end up buried as a vague comment in twitter or perhaps a small flickr photo. I’m not sure what’s holding me back from finishing this blog up. I think part of it comes from a rearrangement of interests, from using a django powered blog to coffee roasting. I thought about moving back to wordpress, as it still exists, and copying and pasting my django blog entries wouldn’t be a big deal. So I’m thinking about it. Sure, wordpress is a pretty easy “plug-n-play” blog app with enough features. However, even utilizing Basic Apps blog app is so much more flexible long term, and I could integrate new apps that I have ideas for pretty easily. Perhaps the direction is to have a working blog on wordpress until I actually have django app related items to integrate into it, and build out the blog after I’ve had additional time to work with django. The template language is the easy part, thanks to Ellington and my job. I guess it’s the finding time part I struggle with the most. Time for some goal setting…