The Author

Hi, I’m Steven. Welcome to my site - a place for my stuff, opinions and trivia. Interestingly, or not …

• I am not a web designer, front-end developer, illustrator or a freelancer.
• I am not a part time or professional musician. I can’t even play an instrument.
• I don’t like coffee or any other caffeinated beverage and have never been to Starbucks.
• Twitter and Facebook are is a load of shite and totally pointless. Hey I’m allowed to change my opinion you know.
• I am not an ex-Navy Seal and have no experience of weapons and tactics.

There, that’s covered most of the cliches.

I live in beautiful Northumberland on the North East coast of England. When I’m not working, which is a major inconvenience, I love to go on long walks with my family and dog, who’s called Molly, along the coast and in the countryside of Northumberland. I also enjoy music, bird watching, intelligent TV and reading.

The History

Many years ago I wanted to learn about CSS, HTML and the LAMP stack but to put learning into practice you need a project. So I got myself a hosting plan (the name of the company escapes me) and bought myself a domain sdobson.com. I flirted with this project but didn’t really do much and eventually the project went tits-up and I let the domain expire.

Sometime later (FFS this is as vague as Paul Di’Anno’s book) I got the bug again so decided to start again. I got myself another hosting plan Justhostme and was lucky enough to get sdobson.com back. I was fortunate to come across an excellent tutorial from Leigh Mackay who used to own and run http://www.phpvideotutorials.com (he has since given this domain away) which demonstrated the fundamentals of the MVC framework (as well as the [W/L]AMP environment) to develop a blog similar to Tumblr. This helped me get to grips with HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and Apache. You can find out more about Leigh at Observable.

With the site completed I tried so hard to concentrate more on content and less on my obsessive fiddling with the design but I just couldn’t. I would go onto the computer and instead of posting something I would start fiddling around with the code. I got a bit bored with that and things came to a head when I last renewed the hosting plan. Things got out of hand (charges went up; VAT was now being added to the prices advertised on their web site etc.) and I questioned the need to spend the money. So I decided to once again cancel the hosting plan and domain.

I’d decided to just do without anything until I started looking into Linux when I bought myself a Raspberry Pi. This seemed to be the ideal solution - a low powered device (and thus cheap to run) which I could leave on all the time and which could host my very own LAMP stack. Also at the time I’d stumbled across some excellent tutorials by Jesse Boyer at JREAMdesign. I worked through the tutorials to come up with a new site which used the Raspberry Pi along with a dynamic DNS service from NOIP.

I was happy with these arrangements until I discovered my employer had blocked access to my site (well more specific sites which are hosted with NOIP). This pissed me off as it limited when and how I could provide updates. So I was in the market for another solution and up stepped scriptogr.am and dropbox. Initially I was very impressed with the way this worked but as time went on I noticed that their (Scriptogram’s) site wasn’t being updated and sometimes the interface for managing the site was becoming less and less reliable.

Just before 2014 I started looking round for another way to reinvent the site and I came across GitHub and Jekyll. Initially I was considering hosting Jekyll on the Raspberry Pi and running it that way but I realised that it was much easier to use GitHub. And here we are.