A place to try things

I just read a very interestingessay written by this guy who works at Valve, the company that wrote Half Life and is a leader in game development.

Michael Abrash paints a picture of a very interesting company to work for. As I read about it, it sounded very Thelemic – each is allowed to follow his or her own Will – there isn’t anyone telling you what to do, you are free to find your own projects to work on. People go in and out of various roles, sometimes leading, sometimes doing individual work.

The company is in Bellevue, Washington, which is a bit east of Seattle.Geographically this is about halfway between the ocean and the mountains.

He also posted a link to the employee handbook, which I read cover to cover.

I sent Michael a note from his website because he said that the purpose in writing his piece was to find people who might find this a place they would want to work. We’ll ass how that goes.

I am attempting to run this site completely from my iPad.

to start with, I am following the instructions I found on this website which showed me how to do this quickly. The site says that having your own site is the modern equivalent of a resume, and suggests that you should be n control of what pele find when they google your name. One nice bonus is that he gives a coupon code which gives a 25% discount on hosting at hostgator.

following these directions, I created my domain registration at namecheap.com. My website hosting at hostgator.com let me . installWordpress automagically from their control panel.

I ran through the setup wizard, selecting the control panel theme as “mobile” which is a pretty simplistic interface, there should not be too much right clicking and dragging.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say here later but this whole process has taken a little over an hour.

I quickly discovered that there was an upgrade to WordPress from 3.3 to 3.3.3. Installation through the control panel I also quickly installed some other plugins such as WordPress seo, WPtouch (which makes a nice iPad version of the blog) and a few others. WordPress came pre installed with Akismet for reducing spam, but I have not enabled it because it entails a monthly charge that I am not currently interested in incurring. I know that this means I will get some spam comments but I will delete them manually for now.

I also enabled google webmaster tools and will also include google analytics very soon. I am able to use FTP to the site for uploading and modifying stuff.

So what will I do with the site? It’s currently under the radar so it doesn’t matter much. I’ll probably put some experimental JavaScript toys up on it, but one project that I a interested involves the drumcircles directory I have always wanted. I suspect that I will soon have to do some things outside of the iPad but I have demonstrated that you ca set up a site and put up some posts with nothing else.

It’s a great start, though, even of it is a little generic for now.