40 years ago doesn’t seem that long ago. But it was. And 40 years ago, I was doing...something.

That’s the reason I started reevaluating my life. It’s common, I guess, that people start to think about the inevitable slide of life. That is what I thought about in 2009. It’s what I think about now.

There’s something going on in the world. Old people are getting old. That’s not the new part. The new part is that those old people are not only highly-proficient with technology, many of them created the technology.

Some enterprising young person has, I have no doubt, run a full series on the aging of the nerds. That whippersnapper probably created one of those annoying gigantic picture–thing info graphics that take 18 minutes to download.

On your phone.

That every kid in the world has these days.

So here’s to people like me. With one foot in the grave, knowing EXACTLY what that Harlem Shake thing is all about. Because that Gangnam Style video was just getting played out.

The title describes where I am, as an average American male. If my life expectancy is 82 years, I’m halfway done. That equates to three feet down, three more to go for a normal Judeo-Christian burial of six feet.

Unless there’s another friggin’ asteroid that comes and kills us all before then.

In the summer of 2003, I dabbled with some basic HTML. When I first got my hands on a copy of GoLive (from Adobe) it opened a world of discovery.

It also opened a Pandora's Box of troubles. As much as I knew (or thought I knew) about HTML, there was always something else to learn. And then I head about this "CSS" that all the cool people were using. I needed to learn how to code sites with HTML, and learn how to use CSS.

After 3 long years of slogging through website redesign after website redesign, I figured I'd just stop. There's just no money in making a website look good (unless you know people--I don't know people). That takes the story to 2009--or more rightly, pretty much every month after 2009.

Complexity

WordPress is something I've used since about the release of version 2.0. I wouldn't say I was an aficionado, but I did hack and crack and bend it to my will for 6 or so years. As WordPress has grown, its feature set has as well. There is a ton of waste in that thing. As of late, it just seems way too...limiting.

That shouldn't make sense. Something extremely complicated and diverse should not cause me to not want to use it. But that goes back to what I used after I used WordPress the first time. Something called Movable Type.

After using it the first day I was hooked. It's an amazingly diverse machine that lets you do basically anything you want to. It's fun, strong, and incredibly, incredibly not used by anybody anymore. The developers have left (for various reasons). The momentum has ended. The company is...I'm not really sure what happened with Six Apart, but they're no longer relevant.

That's sad, because WordPress is getting bigger, and bigger. And that's not always a good thing. Actually, I can't really think of times (other than football teams and dragon-fighting) when being bigger is always better.

Simplicity

I've been itching to stop the WordPress merry-go-round for a while. In 2009 I made the effort to get into blogging again. Even if I was just going to hit it once or twice a month, just to put something in the ether.

What I found after a few months it was very liberating when the schedule meant that I was going to post whenever. It makes it a lot easier to fit that schedule. Later I just...stopped.

It wasn't like I meant to stop writing, it just happened. The creativity was gone. The drive was gone. The reason to write...gone. For whatever reason, I wondered if there was another story to tell.

But having to go through the pains of making sure WordPress made everything perfect just made me not want to use it. If there was some way I could keep...just...writing...I'd do that. If there was just some way to make it so I didn't have to fit into a mold.

That's when Brent Simmons helped me immensely. He put out a plea for "baked weblogs" because so many sites die under the pressure of too many hits. And they're unnecessarily slow. And, in my case, full of stuff I never wanted.

Enter Stacey.

What's funny is, I've always like that name. Now I'm running the system on my site. Plus, I can add new pages without worrying how it's going to muck up my page structure.

My precious page structure.

Ugh.

It's great for writing. It's easy administration (there is no administration). And I can add or remove as many stupid HTML tricks as I want to on a page-by-page basis. It's really awesome.

Sure, I'll miss out on updating the plugins or theme, or sub-theme, or child-theme, or...whatever else they come up with next. Instead, I'll be writing. That's a good thing.

I missed that, and now I've got that back.

You have to be careful who you deal with in this life, because not everybody has your best interests at heart. There will always be people who will hurt you, always people who love you, and most people will be completely indifferent to you.

The best advice I could ever lend anyone would be to avoid mean people. Some people are just mean. On the Internet, those bad qualities are only amplified. In real life, people that are hateful drain others of their joy. There’s a compelling argument to just leave mean people alone.

There’s an old adage that says, “if somebody yells at the waitress, they’ll yell at you.” Over the years, I’ve found this to be one of the most useful pieces of advice I’ve ever received.¹ What makes this proverb so clear is the first time you meet somebody that regards other people so lowly.

As I’ve been working with other people in a group setting lately (after years at a computer desk), the experience reminds me just how some people are just better to avoid. But there is a flip side to this. Seek, gravitate toward, and follow nice people.

It sounds simple to leave the bad and go to the good — and it is. But people don’t seem to do what’s in their best interests. Part of human psyche is follow our learned behaviors. Sometimes those learned behaviors need tweaking. Sometimes they need more tweaking than others.

Avoid mean people. Don’t be their friend. Tell them you are not their friend because they are mean. But don’t forget that you are a person too, and you have to be nice to other people as well.

If people keep avoiding you, now you may know why.

1. Other great pieces of advice include “look out” and “duck”. Presumably these are so commonly known that I didn’t need to mention them. ↩

Following the recommendations of practically the entire Internet, I invested in a copy of Shaun Inman’s Fever (and the domain to host the application). Using it for a few days shows that when I finally learn all its secrets, I will have my own internet tracking service.

That’s important because I’m increasingly running out of time. As I grow older, more people demand more of my time. Just consider that my 30–something attitude is taking shape. Anything that can alleviate one time constraint is a bonus for both time and mental health.

I discovered this today in the preferences. As of the 1.09 update (which you can read about on the spartan update log), you can share your favorite blog posts. This is something akin to Google Reader’s ability to share items.

While I don’t think this will catch on like sharing in Google Reader has, it will be interesting to see if people are willing to set up and share their feeds. I don’t save items, so it isn’t a feature for me I would use. But it’s there and gives owners of Fever something else to brag about.

Also of note are the services that you can add or remove. You could use the syntax of any service that allows you to add content through a link, as demonstrated by the default set. Using one of the zillions of URL shorteners with metrics would be an obvious choice (i.e. Bit.ly).

Inman is already internet famous for his Mint website statistics package. Since I see internalized as being a corporate dead end, I chose not to go that direction on this site. But with the popularity of Mint, and how well Fever caters to the class of people who consume lots of RSS, I’m wondering how many sites are going to start using LAMPMF configurations.¹

ADDED: I should point out the preference for an RSS feed will share your last 30 saved items using this syntax:

http://example.com/fever/?rss=saved

This is the feed that I think more people will begin sharing. It’s also the thing I think I will find most interesting.

1. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Mint, Fever. ↩

It seems like a thousand years since I wrote this:

Webster’s dictionary defines ‘deft’ as this:

Deft: neatly skillful and quick in one’s movements

I define ‘d3ft’ as this:

d3ft: a four–letter .com that sorta looks right if you squint at it the right way. Useful creating an internet identity.

And that’s as much explanation as you’re going to get.

That was in September of 2009. I had so many plans. I had hopes. I had dreams.

It's 2011, and I don't have any of those.

But I do have a snazzy website address, so there's that.

Sigh.