About this site

Prehistory

In some ways, this site has a prehistory, before it ever owned a URL. A long time ago, I think it might have been 1993, when I first discovered the web, things were very different than they are today. For one, the web was a lot smaller. Somewhere along the way, the good folks releasing Mosaic removed the “Internet starting points” from the toolbar. This might have been in 1.1. The justification was that you should build your own pages with useful links, so we can make the web bigger. Yes folks, way back, before there were even bookmarks in browsers, or even more than one popular graphical browser, we were worried that the web would be too small. And thus, I began collecting small pages of links to things I found useful, and serving them off the local web server internally. It proved useful in a few ways. I had what came to be called bookmarks or favorites. I could get to them from multiple machines. Since I had the pages under source control, I could track changes. Since they were on the network, I could point coworkers at them.

Well, those fears have long since been proven unfounded. Browsers grew bookmarks. The web grew far too large for anyone to bookmark. Search engines grew up to enormous proportions, and yet failed index more than 60-80% of it. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Diigo appeared so we could share our links. Yet, this site, bears the marks of that history. In particular, the info section is a direct descendant of those days.

History

Overtime, this became a public site at drewsudell.org. Initially, it was just my collected links. It also became a useful way to share drafts of my masters independent study with my adviser Ed Segall. Then it grow copies of my resume, and various forms of self promotion and self amusement.

Present

In its latest incarnation, a few things have been added. I’ve started a blog, for two reasons. First, to use publishing it as a way to give some focus to my other technical investigations. Generally, I find I don’t understand things just by reading about them. I need to do something concrete to learn the ins and outs. More importantly, I need to explain it to others, so that I take the time to organize my knowledge. It also invites useful feedback and correction from others. Secondly, it’s the web darn it! You have to have a blog. It’s part of being a good citizen of the Internet. Finally, to the degree that some of the technical investigations in the blog concern how ubiquitous distributed computing and the web are changing the nature of computing, publishing, and knowledge, updating the site and adding more dynamic content

How

Currently, this site is hosted on Amazon ec2, running under Apache. Content is generated using Jekyll using a mix of Markdown and XHTML. For complete details, see the colophon for the site.