A couple of weeks ago Becka, Emry and I took a trip to Manhattan to go shopping. Becka wanted some new clothes for her interview and for the upcoming holiday season. I snapped some pictures with my camera phone on the car ride up there. We let Emry watch Beauty and the Beast on my laptop. It keeps her entertained. I’m creating new Mac users at an early age.

Manhattan Trip set on Flickr

I finally broke down.

I joined the millions.

I made a blog.

I had been going back and forth in my mind concerning the domain ‘JeffBaier.com’. I’m still not sure whether I like the vanity domain names, especially the email addresses – ‘jeff@jeffbaier.com’. However, I’ve had a notion to start writing in a blog for some time now. It seems everybody has one now a days.

I’ve also been working on a photo/video blog for Becka and Emry at EmryGrace.com. Originally I had been writing my own blogging software using PHP and the CakePHP framework. I really like using Cake, and I will probably continue using it for any of my future web programming projects. But after the basic post/edit/delete/view blog functions, I got to the point where I felt like I just kept re-inventing the wheel. I was putting lots of effort into something thats already been done well. Thats when I decided to try out WordPress.

I have been very pleased with the features and configurability of WordPress. Previously I had been biased against WordPress and blogging software in general. Most blogs you see are not very well done and don’t stand up to lots of traffic (like the digg effect). But now that I’ve used it for a while, I’ve seen that WordPress allows you to code your own features into it, have nice looking themes, and optimize the blog to be able to stand up to lots of traffic.

This is getting long for a first post, so I’ll wrap up. My goal is to blog about mostly computer related stuff, with sprinklings of my personal life. I have some projects I’m working on now that are linux/server related and I hope to post some writeups about them.