After a few comments and now more than a few emails asking me for my Wordpress theme for this site I figured it was high time to explain a bit about how my site works and the concepts behind it.
The idea is a simple one, but with a bit of an over-the-top solution: I just want a personal site that incorporates (go figure) everything I do online (the vast majority of it, anyway). Since new toys pop-up all the time, I want the site to be flexible enough to deal with any new service that I might fancy down the road.
Blogs aren’t enough. People are tweeting, posting photos to Flickr, adding events to Upcoming, bookmarking to Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia and generally just “life streaming.” Each of these has their own community that I enjoy participating in, so I don’t want to abandon them with the hope of trying to build an entirely new audience on my own site. The solution is obvious, bring in all my distributed “stuff” from these services to my personal site.
A few months ago I was riding the subway out to Coney Island during a visit to New York and I had an idea. It wasn’t necessarily a new idea, but it stuck. I wanted to incorporate my life online. Sure, I’ve had ideas like this in the past. I’ve even tried using tools built on web development frameworks to make it happen, but this time I had some help. After a few conversations over ping pong with my good friend and co-worker Jeff Croft I realized how I could make it a reality. He was working on a framework in Django that sounded perfect, and I was willing to be a bug tester and spend some long nights learning some Django templates. The forces of geek were in full swing.
The concepts had been rolling around in my head for a while, so I started in on some initial designs, worked out some basic templates and have been iterating and implementing on what’s here now since. It’s me, or as some friends call me, T, and almost all my online publishing “incorporated” onto one site. Hence the name, T Incorporated.