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.