Learning New Things – What I’m Doing and Why

By Paul Short on 20/09/2012

Learning New Things

I’m sure a lot of you have been wondering what I’ve been doing lately, or maybe not, so I decided to do a little update here on the blog to let you all know what’s going on in Paulville.

1. I’ve become less active on Twitter lately, mainly because I’ve been doing a lot of work for clients and time is limited. But Twitter is also where I was getting a lot of the headlines and news that I was dissecting and commenting on – news that was causing me quite a bit of stress. So I decided to take a break from it all. I’ll probably be back in the swing of things there soon enough though.

2. As you can see in the image, I’ve decided to learn a web programming language. I’ve always ended up stuck at some point when building my sites because I wanted to add or develop a feature or some functionality but had no idea how to make it do what I wanted. A little chunck of PHP code would have done the trick but when you don’t know what to do or where to start, you’re SOL. So since I had some downtime between clients, rather than go back to twitter and talk about the hideous state of the control-freak elites who run (are ruining) our planet and our lives, I thought I’d teach myself something useful.

And what better way to learn than by building the blogging software I’ve always wanted! Now, before you say “Why not just use WordPress?”, I do love WP. But one beef I have with it is that it does everything, for just about every need a blogger might have. And when you only use about 5-10% of what it offers, the other 90-95% is… bloat. My own software will have absolutely no bloat, no bells and whistles, no stuff I don’t need… it’ll just work and do what I want. Nothing else. I’ll be converting this site over as soon as I have all the kinks worked out. The software (PABS = Paul’s Awesome Blogging Script) is working great on my local WAMP server right now and is about 75% ready to run a simple blog like this one with, so I’ll keep you all updated on my progress.

3. Health. In a previous post I talked about my health and what I’m doing on that front. It’s coming along just great. It’s taken me a while to change 40+ years of bad habits and beliefs in conventional wisdom, but I’m settling into the new routine and I’d never go back now that I’m seeing such dramatic results. How could I when said conventional wisdom is what was causing my health problems in the first place?

So there you have it. Another rare blog post. I have no idea when the next one will happen, but when it does, I hope you’re here to read it