Well... hello, I am Charles Keepax and this is my site mostly about me and other things I like. I am a software nerd, who lives in Scotland with my beautiful and patient wife of 5 years. We are blessed with one very charming daughter, who does her best to make sure I don't sleep in too often.
My family bought our first computer, a BBC master, when I was 8 years old; I was immediately fascinated by it. I have always enjoyed learning new things and solving problems, and whilst programming my world was limited only by my imagination. From that moment on I knew I wanted to work with software and still maintain a real passion for programming today. Professionally, I mainly work on embedded systems but had started to feel I was perhaps neglecting my development in other areas, so I fumbled around looking for a small project to embark upon and decided I was now fashionably late enough that I could start my own blog. The rest as they say is history.
I will leave this a fairly brief, but if you crave more you can read more about me on my cv.
So the site itself, I am afraid I clocked up a fair collection of crazy decisions during the creation of this site, so stick with me here. Language choice first, I have dabbled in PHP since my distant youth and decided that it was probably best to begin with something fairly familiar. I know, I know, PHP isn't that sexy these days, but still it's used in a lot of places, has a huge community, runs everywhere (i.e. nice and cheap hosting), and most importantly more often than not when someone asks me to help with a website the code I usually find myself looking at is PHP. It's the lingua franca of the internet if you will, which made it seem like a sensible starting point.
I thought it would be a good move to compound my crazy language choice with not using one of the many excellent CMS or MVC frameworks out there. "Why would you do that?!?!", I hear you scream. Well firstly, it's a hobby project with no deadlines and I fancied getting my hands dirty. Hobby projects should be fun first and foremost. Secondly, I have done small pieces of work with various frameworks and CMSs over the years and sometimes I hunger to see things from ground up for a change. You learn more creating something from first principals even if it is not the quickest of best way to build something.
Finally, my approach to content management is a little quirky as well. It struck me that the vast majority of content on the site will be static. I will write a blog post stick it up and then usually not edit it again. Secondly, I have found CMSs a little annoying in the past. A page times out or you click the wrong button and bang your large and detailed blog entry is gone; not to mention missing all my beloved Vim features. So if I am generally going to write the content in Vim anyway and then copy and paste it into a CMS, I though why not just fire the file up to the website. So that's what I do I push a new file into the repository and run a small script that regenerates the various index and menu pages for the new content. Slightly unorthodox but it lets me do all my editing in Vim and deploy a post with a couple of lines of command line ninjitsu. At this point I should probably stress that I am not advocating this and if you are building a blog use something off the shelf as I should have done. But I had fun cobbling it together and find using it rather suits me.
Well thats about it, me Charles Keepax, this my site, you hopefully interested reader.