Personal Technology – Series Introduction

By John on Apr 5, 2007 filed in Software, Technology

Over the past year or so, I’ve made a concerted attempt to get all my technology integrated to the extent that is reasonable, and actually helping me manage my life…rather than getting in the way. I think I’ve had a small level of success, so I’m going to write an irregular series on the “technology” I personally use day-to-day.

In some cases, this may be the software I use, other times I’ll write about gadgets I’ve incorporated into my life. I may also use the series to periodically rant and rave about how I or others abuse technology sometimes, and allow it to take over our lives.

I would classify myself as a bit of a gadget head. I like trying new gadgets, but I’m not afraid to return them if they don’t make my life better. However, I make no claim to have “automated” every aspect of my life…nor do I want to.Â I use desktop and mobile technology myself, and I may, from time to time discuss technology I might use out in the world.

I guess I should start with the pieces of the technology that make this blog possible. First, the site is hosted on my personal web hosting account at Bluehost.com. I started out using a hosting service that was purchased by a larger company. They more than quadrupled the annual cost, and reduced the services. Not until I canceled the account did they contact me to offer to “grandfather” me in. I hate companies that play games like that. From there I moved to a company called No Monthly Fees.com. I won’t even provide a link to them, as they were pretty poor service providers. I frequently had problems with their e-mail, and there support was fairly arrogant and unresponsive. I moved to Bluehost about six months ago, and have been pleased so far.

This site is driven by an open-source freeware software called WordPress. WordPress is weblog (aka blog) software. I employ a number of plug-ins written by other software authors. I won’t elaborate too much here about the technology behind the site, as I have a more lengthy explanation already posted on the Deep Technology page here on the site.

The site is integrated with my Flickr account. The photo galleries are hosted there, but you can view them from within this site because of plug-in I use. This is one of the ways I’ve tried to use the best product/service/software for each thing I want to do, but still have everything as integrated as possible. I’ll write more about Flickr and that integration in another article.