Hello World!

Welcome to Murray’s new blog!

I’ve made several attempts at blogs over the years, and I’m hoping this one will last a bit longer.

About Me

I’m Murray. A thirty something male, living in Sydney, Australia.

I’m a husband, father, brother, evangelical Christian, Bible study leader, occasional preacher, programmer, database administrator, performance analyst, general IT assistant for family. And probably a whole bunch of other titles, but that will do for now.

Professionally, I work for Far Edge Technology, mostly developing Wise Owl Legal.

I serve at Wenty Anglican Church where I was converted as a young adult.

I play computer games infrequently by myself, and regularly with my son (who is obsessed with lego games).

I maintain a small, if unusually robust, home network. Which hosts this blog and MakeMeAPassword.org.

Content

The kinds of content I’m planning to post are all under the general banner of Documentation and How To. That is, I want to record and document various things I do and build in the course of my life. So that a) I can refer back to them and b) on the assumption it might be helpful to others (we’ll see how that valid that assumption is).

Based on what I’m involved in at the moment, you’re likely to see posts on the following:

• Programming (C#, web development, JavaScript)
• Home networking
• Biblical exegesis
• Supporting material for Bible talks (aka Sermons)
• General computer how-to’s
• IT security

However, these are subject to change based on what I’m actually doing.

Anti-Content

There are plenty of things I could post about (and used to in the past), but don’t want to this time around. The main category is opinion. Every second person on the Internet has created a Wordpress site to express their opinion (or at least done it on Twitter or Facebook). The Internet is already awash with opinion. I don’t intend to add any more. Particularly overly negative rants opinions.

Posts should always be about building something. That is, a set of instructions, rather than why A is better than B (or worse, why C is the worst thing to exist in the history of the Internet).

Even material supporting Bible talks should not read as a rant, but as a good explaination of a Biblical text. Application of said text is always tricky, but I aim to apply to myself first and others second.

Now, there is an implicit opinion in every post I make: I think whatever the post is about to be best. That is, if I post about my home network, I’m implicitly saying my way is best (or at least good enough). But I trust you can cope with that level of opinion.

Frequency

When I write things, I’ll post them. No promises here. I’m as time poor as the rest of the western world, and my wife was dubious about getting this off the ground in the first place!

So no strict schedule for new content.

Technical

I’m a technical person, and this will be a technical blog, so some basic outline of how the blog is hosted is in order.

I’m self-hosting it. Mostly to save on costs, but also to force myself to learn how to host websites (DNS, web server, certificates, uptime, etc).

It’s generated using Hexo and served as static content from IIS.

I’ve gone with Hexo rather than WordPress or Joomla because a) static content is extremely cheap to serve and b) static content is an order of magnitude harder to hack (a common problem of WordPress and Joomla).

And Hexo over Jekyll because I’m more familiar with node.js than Ruby.

Essentially, the blog is a bunch of Markdown files which are converted to static html on a recurring schedule.