Welcome to 0xDECAFBAD v4, my fourth attempt at establishing and maintaining a presence on the web.
I am your host, variously known as:
deusx- l.m.orchard
- Leslie Michael Orchard
This is all personal branding and googlejuice; my friends call me "Les".
I am a hacker, tinkerer, and creative technologist working in Santa Clara, CA (USA). I live with two spotted Ocicats, two dwarf bunnies, and a very patient and understanding wife. On rare occasions when spare time comes in copious amounts, I play around with odd bits of code and writing here.
What's under the hood?
This site largely runs on WordPress now, with a small handful of tweaks and hacks I couldn't resist tossing in. I haven't yet done any proper release of my modifications here, but I may someday and certainly am not averse to sharing when asked.
@@ Watch this space as I rebuild this site with things it used to have. (ie. a wiki, projects, links, etc)
Got any plugins?
In no particular order, here's an overview of the plugins I use around here:
Optimal Title -- I like making my page titles read from specific to general, so this helps me lead with the post title and trail with the blog title.
dp.SyntaxHighlighter -- Beats all those clumsy attempts I've made using <pre> tags and textareas.
PHP Markdown -- I got hooked on Markdown while using Blosxom and Movable Type. There's no turning back now.
AJAX Comment Preview -- By semi-popular demand, I offer AJAX-enabled comment preview. It seems pretty nifty to have.
Related Posts -- I think that attempting to show some relation between posts provides a better way to wander around in archives than by dates.
Ultimate Tag Warrior -- It's an ultimate warrior for tagging. I dislike the usual category technology, am hooked on del.icio.us tagging, so here we are.
WordPress Administration Design: Tiger -- Because WordPress' default admin style kinda looks like butt.
History
2002: It looked like this. I launched this site on a lark, liking the name oxDECAFBAD. It's a 32-bit hexadecimal number, as well as an expression of distaste for things not containing caffeine. Initially, the software was Movable Type, which I quickly overwhelmed with hacks and plugins and all manner of crap.
2003: It looked like this. Tired of the crud I'd accumulated with my Movable Type exploits, I rebooted things and reworked everything to use Blosxom. I also started taking a turn away from blogging "proper" and mostly posted lists of links for awhile.
2004: It looked like this. I stole some ideas from Mark Pilgrim's accessibility series (whether it showed or not), and planned to switch to a more verbose and article-oriented style of blogging. I also tried to integrate my wiki and link-blogging activities into a more unified navigation on the site. Unfortunately, the net result was that the only thing that really every got updated was my linkblog.
2005: Wanting to switch back to a more free and lightweight style of blogging, I ditched Movable Type and my article-length-biased templates. (For some reason, I always end up making MT move like a battleship.) This is another reboot, and as such, many of my site's previous features (ie. the wiki and linkblog) have gone away until I've had a chance to reevaluate them.
@@ More soon.