After badmouthing the blogosphere along with my favorite tech news source, altough I have had a few arguments while helping Paul get his site online, even if I still have misgivings about the value of having such a minuscule and oversized soapbox online, I have finally resolved to jump.
For various reasons, I need a web site. After all, I do work in this field, and some of my clients (few, though) may be interested in other things I have done. My colleagues might benefit from having access to work material in a different way than formal reporting. There are friends to be made by making one’s views public. And I had various pieces of content lying around that I wanted online.
Remains for me the major question of what ought to be made public. I won’t bore you few readers with a long analysis of my take on this issue right now, but I find it a crucial one, that can make a site most elegant and interesting or break it into arrogance and painfully visible lack of work. That’s something I’ll try to keep in mind.
This web site is called “Petit Bourgeois”, a description of my social status and an insult thrown at me by an otherwise friendly trotskyist and Turkish activist, at a Zapatist meeting in Barcelona in 1997, because as a social-democrat, I looked quite pale, and safe, and timid in comparison. (I had a lot of fun there although I’m afraid I failed to make much of a difference.) It describes something I’d rather not be, yet that does define (in a twisted way: I am a social-democrat!) some of my take on life. Whatever.
At this time, the site will be quite empty, and the layout was shipped by default with the blogging engine I chose. This will hopefully change over the next few weeks, as I migrate the various elements I have in other systems to this one. I’ll also try to customize the layout a bit as soon as possible. Things will definitely move a bit as I get my hands around the tools and push them in place.
You may have noticed already the rather large number of categories. You might notice in the future that some of them remain empty. The reason is simple: I will be using the noria principle to fill this site, which means that I will be posting much more than actually gets published. Many of the posts will thus be for my own private use, while some will enjoy limited release only (wihtin my company or my friends). Some categories will therefore never be used for public posting.
I love reading email but don’t answer much, so feel free to drop me a line here or in my mailbox (raphael [at] petitbourgeois [dot] com).