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We have created this community of bloggers and it gives us an interesting group of folks that we can rely on. In order to support this effort this year I am creating the “First Post of Blaugust” initiative. The idea is that for your very first Blaugust post you take a bit of time and introduce yourself and your blog.

Belghast, Blaugust is coming

Hello, world

Welcome to Blaugust 2024, and welcome to my little website. I suppose I better introduce myself.

Back when Twitter was still Twitter, @ImogenWK produced this viral tweet, which describes me shockingly well. I highly recommend checking out the replies, too, as I'm often depicted there as well.

what is the name for this type of man??

English, Terry Pratchett fan, sardonic humour, left wing-ish, leather jackets, maybe long hair, maybe folk music, Bill Bailey, real ale, usually middle age+. Warhammer adjacent. Likes swords but doesn't necessarily own one?

That's what kind of man I am. My name is Phil. I'm a middle-aged man who lives in the north-east of England with my wife and three cats. For my day job, I'm a programmer and all-round "devops" web developer for a small e-commerce company. In my spare time, I like playing roleplaying games (electronic and pen-and-paper), MMOs, any game best enjoyed with a supplementary spreadsheet, collecting Magic: the Gathering, reading sci-fi and literary fiction, and sitting outside in the sun with a cider.

Just as the tweet suggests, I have long hair, a long beard, a leather jacket, and a selection of shirts that wouldn't look out-of-place on a Time Team expert.

Blogging and Blaugust history

Despite being a web professional (excuse me while I stifle the laughs of my colleagues), I have a shockingly bad history with my own personal websites. I've had blogs off-and-on since I was a teenager, but nothing surviving. A dozen Wordpress installs, many tumblrs, several home-made sites of various complexities, but no real legacy.

This will be my fourth Blaugust. One I completed with a post every day, one with fifteen or twenty or so posts, one that never really got off the ground. None of them still accessible. That's a great shame.

I recently stumbled upon the Indieweb movement, and it really aligned with how I was feeling about the web and my own position within it:

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.

It is a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards and based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

So I started over. I've owned this domain for a long time, and run my own little instance on Linode, so I was all set. I cobbled together what you see here now, and I'm hoping this Blaugust helps me click with writing again. We'll see.