Ok. My real name is Sean McCleary not Mr. Interweb; however, I do feel that the name Mr. Interweb has a better hook for chances at so called internet notoriety.

I have been so conflicted as to what blogging software to use. That launching this site has been quite a deliberation for me. I, like many who might read this blog (someday), am so obsessed with technology and programming that I did not feel it would be right for me to pick so blogging software off the shelf and install it. Oh no. I want to write my own blogging software, but with what technology? Rails? Merb? Should it just run of the mill blog software or should it be a CMS as well. I have wrote enough CMS systems to know exactly what I want in a CMS/Blog, but unfortunately, none of the CMSs I have worked on (at different companies) are open source. I could go on for pages and pages about my inner termoil as to the decision of the blogging software, but I do not want to come accross as overly dramatic. I really am not. I may be highly opionionated about technology, but I am not a drama queen. Anyway, I have choose to get the blog up and running with Mephisto (a really incredible piece of blogging software) and to just let myself write my own Merb / Datamapper based blogging software a little later.

More about me. I am a web software developer that lives in the bitchin city of Portland, Oregon. I try to stay in shape by running and biking. I drink many of the incredibly delicious beers Oregon has to offer. I like the rock and roll that the kids listen to these days. I live with my beautiful wife, Bryn, and my emotionally needy cat, Conan. My not so secret technology crushes are Ruby, Rails, Merb, Javascript, Ubuntu, the command line, and Linux web servers. Technologies I have less of a fond feeling towards are Windows (and most Microsoft products) and PHP. I will spend a good deal of time covering my technolgy crushes and I will not focus much time on the less appreciated list, and so I will cover these now.

When it is up to me, I use Microsoft products as little as possible. Because they either figure out how to bork a piece of software they make. I do not trust their open source endevores. Windows has also caused me a good deal of grief over the course of my technical life, and so I am not fond of Microsoft products.

PHP is a little trickier. I happen to be a pretty good hand at PHP. I have used it for years and I had no intention of abandoning it, until I met ruby. Now pretty much all PHP code seems sloppy, hackish, unorganized, and just plain dirty. I keep trying to use some of the better practices I have learned from ruby in my PHP code, but it still feels like a mess. PHP seems to be a language that has passed through too many hands and is has not bothered to step back and refactor its self. The object oriented aspects of the PHP language are quite apparently an after thought. PHP also tends to attract many new to programming. Not to say that that is a bad thing; but unfortunately, I beieve that the lack of structure in PHP promotes bad programming practices. This is not to say that there is not good PHP code out there. Drupal seems to be a pretty good CMS framework and development for Drupal has been better than I had expected; however, Drupal has its fair share of problems. I’m just saying that it feels to me as if the “good” PHP code out there seems few and far between.

Wow. I just threw down the gauntlet. I hope that my unsubstatiated rant did not offend to much. Like I said before, the purpose of my blog is to focus on and share my learning of the technology that I am interested in. Topics I will be blogging on will include introductory tutorials for Merb because I am a just a beginner with Merb. I will also blog on things I learn in Rails, Javascript, Linux. I will blog about stuff that I think is cool warning may contain video games and Dungeons and Dragons articles. FYI, I’m a pretty big geek so I will be blogging on geeky stuff in general.