I haven’t done enough with my personal domain, and it’s high time I reclaimed this space and made it useful…
Contrary to popular sentiment, I don’t believe longer forms of writing – journals, articles, essays, blogs, are dead. Much can be said in the space of 140 characters, and brevity enforces its own rules. There is a purpose in writing that goes beyond communication into expression. I write to share, and here I will share those things that ask for more space to unfold.
I am a writer, photographer and poet by hobby & a technologist by trade. Since leaving “Gaiam”:http://jacob-stetser.com/play/entries/doc/reclaiming (after heading the development of Zaadz.com as the company’s Chief Technical Officer since early 2007, and leading its transition into Gaia.com after our acquisition), I gave myself a sabbatical to consider my next steps. And I’ve decided that no matter what I do next, one thing is clear:
I’ve got to love what I do. When I love what I’m doing, the quality of attention and care I give it is evident in the end product. Doing what I love turns creating things into an exercise in artistry. This site is about sharing who I am by sharing what I do.
I’ve been trying to build this site for a few years now, wanting to collect the many parts of me together, to reintegrate the pieces of my life scattered through fifteen years of growth and tragedy, travel and settling, relationships breaking apart and new ones forming where I least expect them, friends shifting in and out of my world over time… I’ve been writing this whole time! But I always found myself devoting more time to ‘real work,’ to the people in my life, to other projects… and never quite as inspired by my own concepts and designs as this time around.
Thanks to Google’s anniversary, I recently rediscovered blog entries I’d written as far back as 2001, including a very wonderful (if sentimental) account of my relationship with Kyrie 14 years ago. I know somewhere in my collection of backup CDs (or horrors, on floppy) I’ve saved more blog entries – mostly essays on philosophy and ethical living from even further back to 1996.
And while importing entries from my previous few blogs – at “Gaia.com”:http://jake.gaia.com/ and “Unquiet”:http://blog.unquiet.net/, I had a chance to reminisce, to remember so many things that over the course of everyday life I forget to think about, things that get lost in the fog of our memories as they recede. But they are there, and these images, these essays, these thoughts, these stories, are a map of my world.
The site – as you see it now – is still very much a work in progress. But everything about the site expresses a part of who I am. I designed it, piece by piece, evolving in my head from an initial concept: to flatter and emphasize the words, thoughts & images showcased here; to flow as if it were a magazine; and to celebrate simplicity and open space.
After spending a few weeks on the design, I built this site from scratch in the last two weeks using Ruby on Rails and hand-coded JavaScript. There are so many off-the-shelf products I could have used if I wanted to just build a blog, but I wanted something a little more interrelated, something where I could put my thoughts, my words, my photography, my poetry, presented in a way that encouraged serendipitous discovery.
So the images in blog posts or poems are linked to their own pages, and from there to Flickr, or to any other stories that have some relationship (check out the also menu on the right side). As the site evolves, I’ll be adding more relationships between these pieces of me: location; time; the people involved; the subjects and topics at hand — tying them together in ways both expected and unexpected.
I’m indebted (though he doesn’t know it yet) to “Wilson Miner”:http://www.wilsonminer.com/posts/2008/oct/15/e… — and many other people with design skills far superior to mine — for inspiration to use large fonts and copious amounts of white space in my design, to the Rails community & to a number of Rails plugin and gem authors for their hard work that allows me, among other things, to access “Flickr”:http://flickr.com/photos/unquiet/ and “Twitter”:http://twitter.com/jstetser APIs to pull in the things I express elsewhere, to “Kyrie”:http://jacob-stetser.com/play/photos/doc/3008138021 for encouraging me and giving me wonderful feedback on the design and how the site works.
It’s a start. I’ve got more old work to bring over, more new creations bouncing around in my head, an about section and a section for work-related things. And I’m sure to find bugs and broken things along the way.
But I like my new place now that I’ve decorated and started to fill it with pieces of my past and present. It feels like me.