I’m an interesting mixture of technophile and luddite. I like new technology, and I use the web every day, but I have avoided things like IM, social networking sites, twitter, etc. like the plague. I am sort of a hermit – and yet, I regularly participate in the sharing of knowledge by posting knowledge base documents and sending e-mails to a distribution group I set up. It is called “BrainPool”, an invitation-only group of individuals that I feel are sharp and willing to contribute knowledge for the common good.

I used to view blogging as “It’s all about me.” or “Look at how awesome I am!”, etc. However, lately I have found the resolutions to more than a few technical problems I was experiencing on peoples’ blogs.

It’s not the first time I have found answers online. Googling for forums has been a very lucrative source of information – but I always had to wade through 95% junk to find the 5% of good information. With blogs, the quality of the material is usually better, because people are TELLING, not asking. You still get the hits on the comments, where people are asking how to do this or that – but the hit rate for useful information is higher.

Given the recent success with finding useful technical information in blogs, I decided to set one up for myself. After a rough abortive start with one whose name sounds kind of like “movealong hype”, which had what seemed like good installation instructions which didn’t work, I had success with WordPress. It’s pretty easy to install. There were a few minor gotchas, but nothing I couldn’t overcome.

As I work more with it, I am more and more impressed. I managed to find a theme that closely matches my business website (http://bruteforcetech.com), and I have found about a dozen very helpful plug-ins. The app is very flexible. It starts out small and easy to configure, and then once you have a basic working installation, you can identify features you’d like to have, and go find them in the plug-ins directory (and find some you didn’t know you needed). Then you can put them in one at a time, and configure them one at a time to keep the complexity down. You get to look and see what has changed and what still works or doesn’t work before you go onto the next one. In this manner, I found that after installing one to enhance posting within pages, I got an error when creating pages. So I removed that plug-in and moved on. Awesome.

Anyway, expect to see regular postings here of things I am working on. You can comment without creating an account, provided you can read the OCR failures that are being used as re-Captchas. You can subscribe to a feed, subscribe to comments on individual postings, etc. If your comments are approved once, you don’t have to wait for moderator approval for future comments.

So once again, welcome to my blog. If you’d told me a year ago that I was going to set one of these up, I’d have said something along the lines of “fat chance” – but here I am.

 - Paul