It’s taken me a long time to put this blog on the air, but I’ve had a good time along the way learning about building WordPress themes that scale with window and font size, learning how to back up MySQL, how to move an existing blog to a new hosting provider,  how to use CSS well, and lots of other things that won’t interest you unless you like building Web sites.   Now it’s time to flip the “on” switch.

The idea of having everyone publish on the Web struck me as wonderful from the start:  I think I first heard of the idea while talking with Dave Winer at the O’Reilly Peer to Peer conference in 2001, though Tim Berners-Lee assures us this was his intention for the Web all along. The notion of publishing with a blog model that’s basically like writing everything on one long roll of paper, gradually letting even the important old entries disappear behind the new, seemed in some ways a compromise.  It’s taken me awhile to figure out how I wanted to balance the convenience of updating a blog that users can subscribe to, with the richer structure available from a traditional Web site.  The answer I came to was: do both.

So, I’m also today turning on the Arcane Domain Web site at http://www.arcanedomain.com.  Right now it’s mostly got some basic information about me, and some rough starts on subject-specific pages, but over time I will use it to collect information about computer and Internet technology, music, photography, food, my work and publications, politics, books, and other interests of mine. The intent is to use the Web site for information that should be easier to find, that shouldn’t tend to get buried over time, and that can be updated in place as necessary.  When I make significant changes to the site, I’ll usually post a heads-up announcement in the blog too.

Here finally is the blog, and along with it the Web site.  I hope you enjoy them both.

Noah Mendelsohn
January 25, 2009