Rejon 5.0 New Site Mega Big Huge

I generally go through this pattern every few years where I dive massively into updating my website and spend way too much time getting everything exactly as I want it. This time I really went overboard!

When I started working at Creative Commons, I realized my time to really work on my Open Source projects and spend any real time on my site was going to be neglible. I quickly installed wordpress with an easy theme and blogged with some amount of regularity.

rejon.org 5.0 screenshot

However, since I have lots more time to work on more of what I want, I really knew that from past habits, it is crucial for me to organize my brain by updating my website. Also, it helps in mapping out the next 10-30 years of projects (I don’t have that roadmap up on the site … yet!). And furthermore, its like -10 Celsius outside here in Beijing right now — ts a good time to rock out websites.

At first glance, you’ll notice I tried to take into account three streams of information: more focused blogging/textual area, a quick view of the main content of the website (projects, writings, and teaching), and then the now all important, lifestream — featuring Identi.ca, which I post to way more than my blog.

So, please check out my updated website, and if you find bugs, please comment on this post. I built a fair amount of code to handle project management, make connections between my wiki, tagged content, and getting posts and pages all to work well together. I’m releasing all this code through the fabricatorz wordpress plugin, all AGPL’d. The code is documented, but I haven’t documented how to get the lovely project categories running with various metadata available about each project. The system also uses as many built-in wordpress media management and tagging systems.

I have input much data about my various involvements into this site now and am tracking start and end dates, the status of projects, sub-projects, links to the projects, collaborators, affiliations, tags, and wiki pages. If you see information that is not there, then please do send an email to get that information updated — especially if I accidentally left off a name or two on the collaborators information about any of the projects posted up.

You can view this entire system being exposed on the right hand menu in the Projects page. If you navigate to this page, there are various controls for filtering views of the list of items categorized as a project. Then, this same approach is applied to the Writings and Teaching pages.

My goal in creating this management system is to make it easy to document any of my involvements, and to not have to maintain lots of websites and project spaces externally, especially for quick projects.

Finally, in a similar thinking to this system, I nuked all versions of my past resume and CV, and now just have a comprehensive CV listing out all of my involvements and more. The information on the CV is still not complete, but I have to just launch this sooner rather than later (especially in the press section).

I would say the same thing about the projects, writings and teaching sections. The basic information on these sections is posted, but I still need to over time add more images and other media to increase the level of documentation on all projects (and hopefully get more people involved too). Regardless, the big hurdles are out of the way.

Because of this “personal” development, I also have been delaying blogging and launching some other fun news items in favor of just getting this complete. Look for some more juicy posts in the next few days particularly in the realm we all love, generating income!

I now present rejon.org 5.0