Wyatt Gallagher

There’s a lot for me to say, but first, let me take this post to say hello and welcome back to my blog.

Photos

Check out my photos! Okay, it’s just one photo. I just started.

This is my replacement for Instagram (Stories). It’s not done but it’s good enough to go up. My ultimate goal is to add HDR photo and video support. In the meantime, guess I need to start taking walks again for those sweet summer sunset pics.

Everything else about the site

There’s a lot more for me to get working. I’ve been sitting on this since February struggling to get through the last 20%, but I’m impatient to get posts and videos up. Some of my past project pages aren’t back up yet; the Thoughts (text posts) archive page is very simple; and there’s a lot of little details that I want to work on. Also, I’m sure the whole site scores poorly on accessibility, and narrow display support is poor.

But it works on a MacBook, and getting it live will help me stay motivated.

Consulting?

One other thing that I planned to have done before shipping was a page on my design consulting services. I’ve had a slight change of plans. More on that is coming soon.

Federation

Finally, this is federated! I’ve already been on Mastodon through my own server for, believe it or not, a couple of years now; but back then the official ActivityPub plugin for WordPress was very early and rough. It’s more robust now, and specifically allows for a “whole-blog” federated account instead of requiring you to use WordPress author accounts. I’m the only author, and I don’t want this to be confused with my Mastodon, so that was a dealbreaker. At some point I’ll write more about the cool and important things that I think federation enables, but for now I’ll lead by example.

The point of it all

Ultimately, all of this is me trying to lead by example, to stop complaining about how bad things are and to start doing something about it. But I know that you—yes, you reading this—aren’t necessarily someone with time or energy or skills or desire or all of the above to maintain your own website and take on all of this work. I have an excuse: this site has been a self-teaching platform for literally most of my life. I recognize this, and leading by example means not just doing, but enabling.

Hopefully this gives you a taste of what I’m up to and what you’ll be seeing from me. I certainly have enough to stay busy. Give me a bookmark and check in once in a while!