Daniel Stolt's Blog

The Blog – Reloaded!

So here I am. 05:41 in the morning of the second day of 2009. After almost a year of thinking, visualizing, planning, designing, coding, testing and tweaking (the past 8 days of which have been the most extreme) I am finally ready to re-launch my blog! I made a half-hearted attempt at it about a year ago, tried out various blog engines and themes, but quickly realized I wanted (had to have!) my very own unique look. As it turned out, it took me more than a year to turn that idea into reality.

Thus – welcome to my blog!

For a few years now, I’ve been saying to friends: “I really should be blogging.” Two kinds of things frequently pop into my brain that makes me want to share my thoughts with the rest of the world:

Complaints on the state of things. I am constantly bothered by all the inefficiency and stupidity that I observe on different levels of society. Mostly it’s just these really practical everyday things, like how stupid it is that we carry around so many pieces of plastic in our wallets when one should suffice (the topic of an upcoming post, no doubt). It’s strange because I don’t consider myself an extremely opinionated guy, and yet so often I get so frustrated with such obvious inadequacy.

Results from venturing into unknown programming territory. It’s not very often that, as a developer or IT professional I encounter a problem that no one else seems to have reported a solution to (at least one that Google knows about). But it does happen. And when it happens the result is usually anywhere from a couple of hours to several days of research and troubleshooting before finally coming up with a solution. And as a good citizen of the developer ecosystem, I of course feel the overwhelming need to share it with my peers so that anyone facing the same problem now or at some point in the future may benefit from my pioneering efforts. You know, give something back for a change.

Now I have a forum in which I can express these things without further delay!

So those two kinds of things are mainly what I will be posting. There will be other things too, I’m sure. We’ll just have to see what enters my brain. It’s quite conceivable that I might be posting both in English and Swedish (the latter of which is my native tongue), and I will maintain separate categories for both languages so that you may select to subscribe only to one of them if you like.

I also plan to make this blog a place where I can host various articles and pieces of software I plan to publish in the near future. I have so much stuff just sitting around for far too long now because I didn’t feel I had an adequate place to make it available for your perusal. Well, I guess this morning marks the end of that. Damn, I am so excited!!! :)

Before I go, a few words about the technological aspects of this blog. It is running on BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5, and the graphical design is implemented as a theme. There are some features of the theme I’m particularly happy with:

Complete separation of markup and style (with a few exceptions imposed by the engine emitting crappy markup).

Completely flexible and “stretchable” layout.

Heavy use of PNG transparency. This should be obvious for instance in the way the illustration and green-to-black gradient in the header interact when you change the width of the browser window.

Speaking of the illustration, some folks have already asked me what meaning it is supposed to convey. I want to leave this up to each individual beholder to decide (you know, just like the kindergarten lady used to say about abstract art). Maybe it symbolizes the general area of human-machine interaction, a subject to which this blog is partly devoted. Perhaps it represents my frustrations in trying to make these damn machines do what I want them to do. Hell, maybe it even accurately depicts the feelings of the various women who have tried their best to love me over the years.

Leave a comment and tell me what you see. I’m off to bed now.