The start of my online writing, and future trends.

A GPS unit circa-July 2006. Only seven years ago and hard to believe it's bigger than a smartphone and all it did was do location (in comparison to what you phone is capable of now). Interestingly, also provided the same amount of battery life as you get from a modern smartphone - 24 hours.

This website came about for a multitude of reasons. Originally, in a Research and Development role with a previous employer and a wish to stay involved in online social trends. My logic is always if you want to understand something, get stuck in!

So, in 2006 I started a personal blog (all content copied here on this site) which gave a perfect opportunity to write around my favourite hobby of climbing and travel. Things learned from writing the blog:

• it's a phenomenal creative outlet, I'd recommend it to everyone
• Having control of your own home for content is huge. Websites come and go (remember MySpace!), not to mention how content is presented (Facebook heavily filtering and attempting to intelligently sort user's timelines, for example) so having a home that I decide where all information goes seems critical.
• having a location to write doesn't give you any more credentials than anyone else. but it does give you visibility.
• the rush of changing technology rears it's head in the blog - sites I used to host images, etc, have dropped to the wayside leaving lost images and dead pages. Lesson? host all images alongside the content as much as possible.
• Looking back at my writing in earlier times, it's great to see the improvement in quality.
• Just because more and more people are writing (although many just through other means now - facebook, tumblr, etc - doesn't mean it's a bad thing that not all will get a lot of visibility. Just writing and putting it out there is a good thing.

Now, with the advent of newer modes of reading (amazing to think that the iPhone was not released until July 2007 - 15 months after I started writing), methods of adapting to different screen sizes is essential for any page. And thus I felt the need to reboot my knowledge. Learning the essentials of CSS and HTML5 in 2013 (CodeAcademy was great for this) to keep up to date and gave a good insight into this. Watching stats across a multitude of pages and sites I'm involved in (40+% of visitors to most of those sites seem to consistently come from mobile devices). 

And thus here we are. January 10th, a new website. My writing will be kept in two sections:

The Personal Blog - home to everything sport and travel-related. While hugely important and incredibly important to many of my views and perspectives on everything work-related (seeing how people of other cultures use technology gives a great insight into trends and possibilities as well as my own experiences just using technology while traveling), it's easier to keep separate. There's also potentially a lot of items related to my sport, climbing, that probably deserve their own home!

This Blog - the title gives it away, technology and education. Taking inspiration from such blogs as John Gruber's Daring Fireball, expect a similar concept - links and comments on anything I find interesting.

A good start to 2014