Hello.

If you've been here before you'll have noticed that I've changed things a bit; moved the furniture around, repainted the skirting boards, stripped the old wallpaper and removed the artex from the ceiling. Hope you like it.

I've gone for a much simpler, more stripped-back look-and-feel this time around. I'm not interested in having a cluttered blog, and I've got plans to add some extra things to this site in the not-too-distant future. The idea is to keep a nice clean aesthetic throughout the entire site, which is going to become much more of a showcase for my photography work than anything else.

Yes, I'll still post about Ubuntu and Launchpad here, but this site is primarily about me the photographer, not me the developer. If I feel that I have a lot to say here about the developer side of my life then I might think about setting up another blog to deal with it.

For those of you who want technical details about what's changed, well, there's not all that much. The site uses a lot more of the Frabjous codebase now than it used to - there was a lot of duplication of code in the grahambinns.com tree, so I've cleaned that up - and I've added a few things to Frabjous whilst I was working on the retheme and upgrade, which is nice and mutally beneficial.

Anyway, I'm aware that there will likely be bugs in the new version of the site that crop up over the next few days, so please do let me know if you come across any.

So, first off, brain is better than it was early Friday morning, though I still have a head full of snot, so everything smells of the kind of old, forgotten dustiness you find in attics.

More brain-dumpery, I'm afraid, since I can't be bothered to make this into anything coherent.

Alan Bell replied to my last post with the following comment:

So the software developer box doesn't quite fit, the photographer box doesn't quite fit, the writer box doesn't quite fit. I suggest a Graham Binns shaped box, blog about whatever the heck you want to.

A good suggestion, and one which deserves a reply.

The fact is that I'm not trying to get into a box so much as I'm trying to control which aspect of me people come across when they search for me on the web. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to trying to make my website work for me as a sort of photography business card, i.e.: Look here, this is me, this is what I do, this is my creative process as a photographer.

Now, granted, I've come only lately to the photography game, but the fact of the matter is that in my head there's been a shift in how I perceive myself. Now I'm a (admittedly inexperienced) photographer who can write and who can hack, rather than a hacker or writer who can take a decent photograph. I need that to be reflected in my blog, or at least my website, because I intend to make money out of this photography gig (though I'm not betting on making a living out of it; I've no intention of giving up the day job and I've every intention of being a full-time developer for a long time yet).

This might seem a bit weird to a lot of the people reading this blog, because so many blogs out there on the web are about what the author is thinking rather than about who or what the author is.

Think of it this way. If you, in the course of your daily life, were given business card of, say, a landscape gardener, and told "check out my website if you want to see what I'm capable of," you might be a little confused to go to www.myfirstlandscape.com and see, on the front page, an essay about - to pick a topic at random (honest) - the pros and cons of Ubuntu changing its default search for Firefox from Google to Yahoo. It would have no relevance to you in the context in which you're viewing the site (as the potential customer of a landscape gardener). It would detract from the basic purpose of the site, which should be to sell the author's abilities in landscaping.

And that's why I'm thinking of moving all my other stuff - the writing, open source and other general blather - onto a different blog, maybe on a different domain or maybe on a subdomain of grahambinns.com, whichever suits best. I've spent some time this weekend hacking multiple site support into the Frabjous blog engine (very simple thanks to Django) so I'm at least in a position to use my existing infrastructure should I decide to go down that route.

Feel ratty beyond belief right now: really cruddy front-brain headache, eyes stinging, that kind of thing. And this is just a cold; annoying as hell and it makes it hard to think. This may be brain-dumpy in the extreme.

But thinking I am, a bit, about what to do with grahambinns.com. It doesn't serve its purpose anymore because I don't know what its purpose is anymore. I thought, long ago, it'd be a blog about writing, but then I stopped doing so much of that. It started to be a blog about software development, but never really grew into that role because I don't talk that much about it and the Open Source community by and large makes me want to scream with frustration (the subject of another rant. Not here, not now). Then I thought it would be a blog about photography but though I made some inroads there I didn't make enough; lack of dedication to the cause there; something I need to change in 2010.

But here's the thing. I want to make something of myself as a photographer (yes, yes, I've got past saying "I want to be a photographer" because I already am a photographer whether I thought so before or not. If I'm going to do that I want to be blogging about it all, the failures, the successes, the pitfalls, the ideas, the crazy, wild-eyed, midnight shoots in dodgy parts of London (probably not, but you never know). And that just doesn't gel anymore with what this blog as been about for the last five years (well, five years on February 17th).

So, what to do? Start over with a new blog? Migrate the non-photography content away from here and over to somewhere else? Rethink things entirely?

It's about identity. When people Google me, who do I want them to see? Do I want them to see me as a photographer or me as a hacker / hack / musicial hack / internet crusty? This blog is currently the top result on Google UK for my name, followed by some weird crap about finding my phone number and then something about a Maj. Gen. in the British army. And the Youtube clip from UDS Jaunty.

So keeping the site is a good idea. What to keep on it though? I think photography. I think that, when you go to grahambinns.com you should see me as a photographer, that side of me, not the developer side of me, because when I'm in public - unless I'm with the hacker crowd anyway - I'll say, if I'm asked, that I'm a photographer. It just comes out; can't stop it. I don't always add the "but my day job is as a software developer" corollary any more, which is empowering in itself.

Maybe that's what needs to happen; I need to separate those two identities so that they don't bash into each other.

Something that Ariana Osborne said a while back rings true:

If you want to sell something online, you’ve got to make a network online. You’ve got to go places and talk to people, yes – but unless you are struck by lucky lightning, you’ve also got to give those people something they can link and remember and pass along to other people.  And, for most of us, that “business card” if you will, is our homepage.  In theory, that homepage should be something people can bookmark to remember us by – but if it’s a static page there’s a very good chance that people will forget why they bookmarked it in the first place.  So most of us – by accident or with some thought – have created a blog of some fashion.

Maybe I need to get something to help me sleep. Yes, that seems quite likely too.

Sorry if you just got spammed with two copies of the same picture. The Flickr-grabbing script is a bit eager and it slurped the image before I could change the posted date on it.

You'll live.

... then the DNS records have propagated correctly and your RSS feed reader is now slurping from the new grahambinns.com server, which is just hunky dory as far as I'm concerned.

I've been working on this version of things for a while. Besides a re-skin - which taught me a lot about how I should be designing my templates and CSS, so it should be a bit easier next time - I've also tidied up the codebase a bit and added some new features. Most of them are under the hood, but here are some of them for those of you that care:

• Each piece of content on the site has its own license. For example, all my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA, as is all the content here so far. But when I start adding stories here (and it will happen within the next few months, I hope) I'll be able to license them as I see fit.
• I can now make posts using markdown syntax. This might not seem like a big deal but over the years I've come to loathe sites that simply turn linebreaks into <br />s (yes, Wordpress, I'm looking at you. You still do it, even with valid HTML posts). On this site I used to use TinyMCE as a WYSWIG HTML editor, which worked fine but was pretty horrendous to load on a slow connection. Now I just use markdown and let Django's markup app do all the work. Fantastic.
• You can now post comments using markdown syntax. No more trying to post a link and having Django eat it!
• I can now post to the blog by email. I thought about using gpg signatures to validate my emails but realised that it was too complicated (we do it in the Launchpad email interface and one look at that code a while back persuaded me to not do it unless I had to). Instead I've gone for generating single-use authentication tokens, which suits me fine and should hopefully - along with an obscure incoming address - stop spammers from doing nasty things.
• The site now supports pingbacks, though at the moment it can only receive them until I iron out some issues with the pingback sending code.

There are a lot more things that I've fixed, added, tweaked and polished, but none that are particularly interesting.

So here, finally, are the vital statistics of the new site:

• Server: Bytemark virtual server running Ubuntu 8.04.
• Django 0.97-pre (to be upgraded to 1.0 stable when it comes out in September).
• PostgreSQL 8.3 (the migration to which fixed so many problems it's unreal).
• Apache with mod_python for serving the Django stuff.
• Lighttpd for serving the static files.