The Tech
- WordPress / LAMP – This alone will tell the informed reader a bit about where I land1 in the web tech caste system2. I’m old enough to remember when LAMP was new. Young enough to have welcomed it as an alternative to more intensive ways of building MVC-ish sites and also young enough to have breathed a sigh of relief when SPA and more mature JS/ECMA offered other ways of doing things. For me, WordPress remains a quick and easy way to set up sites like this one. It has a robust ecosystem of plugins and themes supported by a community of contributors and users deeply invested in maintaining and improving its stability and security. Also, it’s open source and free to use.
- McLuhan Theme by Anders Norén – I wanted something stripped down but with some style to it. Something I might have tried to build myself back in the day. Only better. Simpler.
- Managed Cloud Hosting – Back in the 2000s, I worked with nearly all of the major managed WP hosting services out there. Ten+ years ago that landed me on MediaTemple with a semi-managed dedicated volume solution. GoDaddy bought MT, swallowed the service and turned it into what all digested things eventually become. Recently, after a bit of research, I moved to CloudWays by Digital Ocean3. So far. So good.
Tools
- CLI – iTerm, zsh (via oh-my-zsh), tmux
- Local/Lower Environment(s) – Docker instead of MAMP. I learned a bit about Docker and joys of containers during my time at Target. And wow, am I glad I did. MAMP served me well for many years, but it feels like overkill and a bit overly specific. Plus there’s an official WordPress container!
- Code Editors – Zed, Vim, and TextMate (with a dash of XCode as needed). I’ve used TextMate for a long time and stand by it as a bare bones Mac GUI text editor. But I like trying new things and used Atom for a couple of things back in the day, so I thought Zed deserved a shot. Like all IDEs it offers quite a few features, but every feature introduces complexity. Huzzah for Vim!
- Browser – Arc. Moving off Chrome was a long time coming. While I applaud the move by all the major browsers to stop supporting 3rd party cookies, I think Chrome puts Google too much up in my business. Freedom is an externalized cost of vertical integration. Arc uses the chromium innards, but it stands apart from Google. I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with it, but for now, I am enjoying their interface innovations.
Other Stuff You Might Want to Know
- Text and Images are all by me, Daniel Damkoehler, unless otherwise noted.
- License is what the good folks at Creative Commons call the Attribution 4.0 International license. Basically, you can use my stuff (be certain its mine, not something I’m using/quoting) as you see fit as long as you credit me.
- Config, customization, and admin are also all by me except as noted (meaning most of this is leveraged tech with me hacking bits to suit my needs and wiring everything together).
1. I'm familiar with GNU, Emacs and Richard Stallman. I use Vim, TMUX, and zsh, but welcome the help of IDEs and code editors like Zed or TextMate (see the tools section below) - for good or ill, I've spent most of my computing time in windows gui environments.
2. This notion of the tech caste system probably deserves its own post. Maybe someday. If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, I’m not sure you work in tech. If the word caste makes you uncomfortable, I understand, but… I think it fits. It’s a caste system that allows for considerable mobility, but it does exist.
3. Sure, I *could* have done the straight up cloud container thing. But I really like not thinking about admin-ing a server for months at a time.
