About This Site

(If you want to know more about the author, rather than the site itself, you want this oth­er page.)

This site is run using Word­Press, a mar­velous open-source blog­ging plat­form that func­tions very nice­ly as a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. I use var­i­ous plu­g­ins to extend and cus­tomize WP.

Wow. It’s incred­i­ble how much sim­pler this bit is than when I start­ed this site in 1995! I ini­tial­ly cre­at­ed it so I could play—with HTML, with col­ors and pat­terns, and with words—and for a few oth­er rea­sons, as well. It has changed from time to time as I dis­cov­er new toys or grow tired of old ones. I’ll always be a child at heart, sub­ject to bursts of enthu­si­asm and a ten­den­cy to want to share the lat­est delights I’ve found with every­one. Hav­ing a web­site is a less-annoy­ing way to do that than to be con­stant­ly email­ing all my acquain­tances with URLs and such!

The site has gone through var­i­ous trends in design, from plain old HTML to frames to tables to CSS and now a CMS. I’ve stayed away from the bleed­ing edge, but I try to be some­what con­scious of stan­dards. I’m still work­ing on ensur­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty through­out the site when using Word­Press, as the code does­n’t always val­i­date prop­er­ly, even when it looks just fine.

At one time, there was a list of web pub­lish­ing resources here, with some notes about learn­ing to cre­ate web­sites. That stuff was too out­dat­ed to be help­ful, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve need­ed to refer some­one to them or had any­one men­tion using them.

Thanks

For many years Jay Finch was kind enough to host this and the oth­er sites our fam­i­ly has cre­at­ed. We will always be grate­ful to him.

Jim Esten of Web­Dy­nam­ic did a fan­tas­tic job of writ­ing some CGI scripts used on an ear­li­er ver­sion of the site and hold­ing my hand through learn­ing enough vocab­u­lary to know how to ask for what I need­ed. I whole­heart­ed­ly rec­om­mend him if you need any sort of web-relat­ed pro­gram­ming or training.

Site Name

I have been Tech­noMom since 1995 when I was the first woman hired for a tech­ni­cal job at Mind­Spring Enter­pris­es, and that was the title my super­vi­sor placed on my busi­ness cards.

A for­mer SO called me the Ene­my of Entropy because I tend to orga­nize the crap out of any­thing I take over.

What’s this thing about being perverse?

A few of the words my the­saurus (thank you, Houghton Mif­flin) sug­gests for “per­ver­si­ty” are bull­head­ed­ness, dogged­ness, hard­head­ed­ness, obsti­na­cy, per­ti­na­cious­ness, per­ti­nac­i­ty, tenac­i­ty, wilfulness.

Yep, that’s me. I am, in fact, absolute­ly unmove­able when I know that I am right. It does­n’t mat­ter how many peo­ple dis­agree with me, how much it costs me, or how dif­fi­cult my life is as a result—I do not back down.

It isn’t that I’m not open to new infor­ma­tion or oth­ers’ input. But I will not hide the truth as I know it. As you might imag­ine, I don’t play pol­i­tics. On the oth­er hand, peo­ple usu­al­ly learn that I’ll tell them the truth, peri­od, regard­less of whether I like or agree with them. The best boss I ever worked for asked me the most chal­leng­ing ques­tions because he knew I’d always give him a straight, even if unpop­u­lar, answer.

That’s per­ver­si­ty for you, folks. I’m per­verse to a pur­pose. I was rad­i­cal­ly hon­est long before Mr. Blan­ton set­tled on that title for his franchise.

So—I’m Tech­noMom, the Ene­my of Entropy, being Pur­pose­ful­ly Per­verse on a screen in front of you.