I have spent most of this evening working on a makeover for the PluggedOut website. The general idea has been to make it more simple to navigate (everything within a click), and simple to look at.
I have owned the PluggedOut domain for a long time now - since 2000. It was originally put online as a stopgap while developing a writing website called “ThoughtCafe”, and ended up becoming my homepage on the internet, and outliving ThoughtCafe.
These days, PluggedOut exists as my “professional” blog - carrying technical geekery, industry insight, opinion, and information on any funky websites I come across. The site also serves as a base for the various “open source” programming projects I work on in my spare time (now there’s irony - spare time…).
Among the projects I work on is a blog engine - predictably called “PluggedOut Blog”, that is used by hundreds of people all over the world to publish their blogs onto the internet. It’s perhaps not as fully featured as the likes of WordPress, but many more developers use it. There’s a message there somewhere…
Who knows. Maybe one day - in several hundred years time - my descendents will be researching the family tree, and when they search for my name, the networks will light up like a christmas tree. It’s already happening for me with Google, and Yahoo. Try it - go and type “Jonathan Beckett” into Google…