stuartforsyth

I’ve been looking for a way to share the things I love to do: my writing and my photography principally, but even the software I’ve written and have yet to write.  I have looked at a number of off the [virtual] shelf products and found them wanting.  The vast majority of them are just way too restrictive in the way they want you to work.  Each product seems to be trying to funnel, and press you into becoming one of the thousands of other walled-in users through design choices and functionality barriers.  I don’t know why but the best visual metaphor I have for it are those scenes of the European wine-pressing festivals where hundreds of thousands of perfect grapes go into these barrels and are tromped on for hours until all that is left is the undifferentiated juice of the collective. A voice amongst the thousands has no way to express itself, a scripted workflow has no way to differentiate itself, and most importantly the essential integration hooks I require as part of a longer term product plan would just be a nightmare. The long and the short of it is I don’t believe I can build a distinctive personal brand to showcase my passions without doing the job myself.

So over the last day or two I’ve swapped my pen for my laptop, my stories for languages of another kind.  I rolled up my sleeves, have set up the latest version of Ruby on Rails on my Mac, consulted my layout sketches and started cobbling together a framework for my site.  It’s good practice for me; it’s been a while since I’ve sunk my teeth into any code of real significance and it’s an essential refresher before I get to do the real juicy publishing stuff that’s I have planned.  There’s nothing fancy just yet, mostly basic product administration pages, listing and feature showcases, git source control and a shopping cart.  There are the ubiquitous social hooks into my various social media channels and I’m playing with Twitter’s Bootstrap css and javascript framework for layout. The first tentative steps have been taken.

All in all not too bad for a couple of hours work.