Recollections and New Directions

Things have been pretty hectic lately and unfortunately I've had to push back a number of updates to this site, as random work and business requirements threaten to overwhelm... There's still no archive links, mainly because I still have yet to nail down the scope of what this site actually is. I've been noodling around writing an XML publishing tool that generates an Atom file for each entry, and working on a few new articles here and there, but permanence still eludes me...

For a while I've been thinking about getting more involved in open source development, but haven't really had the time or energy to maintain the focus that is so important with projects involving a serious lack time and budget. Well, last week was a week full of surprises and new opportunities. For the first time in a couple of months, I was able to spend a few days thinking out the conceptual/solution definition aspects of several new projects, involving planning, designing diagrams, and not writing any code - and at the same time, continuing the run of serendipty I've been experiencing lately, I got involved in a new open source project to build a PHP based document server and acceptance test generator, called Arbiter - more on this soon.

The onset of this new wave of motivation (how long will it last?) has also encouraged me to kick start some of the other meandering side projects that have been sinking for far too long - I've set up a little code dump on Sourceforge to stash a few application development tools, including the codebase of core PHP classes that I find myself constantly reusing. If you want a slice of the pie, you'll have to download the module from anyonymous CVS, as I currently have no plans to tarball a file release...

Should this site be about code, or information design, or philosophy? I still don't know. I'll just keep winging it until some kind of pattern starts to coalesce. But if there is anything you'd particularly like to read about, or any feedback you have - don't hesitate to drop me a few lines.