Indeed. Their heritage is, of course, HTML. The original vanity press of the Internet. However, this style of self-publishing arrives with different connotations than self-publishing in the world of books of paper. It is inexpensive and easy. If your uncle’s dog has a website, why not you?

Web sites and, lately, blogs provide indices to the vast world wide web. Find a like-minded individual, sift through their personal musing and selected links, and you enter the web through a friendly portal. When I can find ’em, I prefer an individual’s quirky view of the web to search-engine-generated lists of sites.

After lurking in the land of blogs for quite a while, I’ve decided to create one of my own. It feels a little strange to write words for a potential audience of anonymous strangers. Oddly, I never felt that way about writing software.

I imagine in my mind’s ear that this story is for my friends and colleagues, but I’m posting it on the public Internet. Since I have benefited from the blogs of others, perhaps there are those in this sprawling ‘net community that may be interested in mine.

It was much easier installing moveabletype into this media temple account than it was getting it up and running on my Windows machine at home. I always like to have a local version of software to play with and it has been fun (in a geeky sort of way) getting to know the archane rites of MySql, perl, Apache, and whatnot.

Many thanks to
– the people of the opensource movement who wrote all this software
– Ric, who I don’t know, but who wrote a great tutorial for setting up a windows server
– media temple for making it even easier than that
– and lastly, Kevin Lynch, who is always an inspiration, but specifically, in this instance, pointed me toward Moveable Type and, perhaps unknowingly, inspired me to create my own blog.