After a years-long hiatus, I'm back in the business of creating new web content.
Since the last batch of updates, I've gotten married, become a home owner, changed jobs, and completed a Masters degree in Software Engineering. I've also taken over the the webmaster-ship of the CoolerCrew web site, a site dedicated to the Saint Paul Winter Carnival Medallion Hunt, a site also destined for this kind of Drupal makeover (As a result, all medallion hunt related content from this site has been integrated there). My wife and I also run an eBay Store called Grandma's Attic of Treasures where we sell various treasures we've found at garage sales, items we consign for others (I'm a registered eBay Trading Assistant), and other stuff we've got around the house.
Why the sudden rush back into producing web content? Well, while I spent 2006-2008 working on that Masters degree, I took a course in my final semester on dynamic programming languages. The instructor was very adamant that as future technological leaders, we students not only read and keep up with the cutting edge of the tech world, but also create and produce content in that world. Now, given that not many students these days have time to maintain a web site, let alone completely revamp one, the content creation aspect of the lecture slipped by me until after graduation. Now that I'm done with school (at least until I get started on my PhD in the fall, I've got time to start this place from scratch, importing relevant content and removing obsolete content from it.
More importantly, I want to start blogging. I've got so much trapped inside this head of mine that I want to get put down on paper, or the web. Since I last touched this site in 2001 or whenever it was, a lot has changed in the world of available web software. When I started this site, it was done entirely in Microsoft FrontPage. After I took over the Cooler Crew site, I learned that maintaining hundreds of static HTML pages is not the way to run a site, and brewed my own pseudo-content-management-system in PHP to maintain the site. Still, creating all that PHP from scratch is no small task, although it does make for easy changes. While in my classes, one of my fellow groups' projects was to document the architecture of Drupal. I was intrigued. A full content management system, entirely open source, that is extensible and integrateable with software like phpBB and Gallery. Wow. Thus, Ares' New Palace was born. (And once I get my work done on my site, the new CoolerCrew.com will be born as well).