SimplePrimate

Welcome to my Simple Primate blog relaunch! Around 2007 I started this blog as a way to connect with my students at Lodestone, discuss my speaking engagements, and promote my ever-growing catalog of courses on lynda.com. Shortly after starting it I made a change and became a full-time author at lynda. Unfortunately changing my focus had an almost immediate effect on my blog, which went dormant. I should have channeled even more energy into the blog and used it to supplement my courses, including all the details that I couldn’t fit into them. Truthfully though after a full day of writing for my courses I very rarely felt like firing the code editor back up and blogging. I also became very frustrated with WordPress. Unlike my friend Morten, I found it tedious to make minor edits and didn’t feel like becoming a WordPress developer just to build my blog the way I wanted to.

Of course, those are all just excuses. So many of the people I admire in the web development field give back to the community freely and in a way that allows all of us to benefit from their hard work. I remember listening to a keynote from Chris Coyier where he talked about being asked over and over again “how do you keep up with everything going on in web design with your schedule?” He laughed about it and kind of played it off but his basic response was, “it’s my job.” That hit home with me, because for almost 20 years now my job has been to educate people in design and web development. However almost everything I’ve done has been behind one paywall or another. I’ve been extremely blessed to be able to build a career doing something that I love and that I’m passionate about. I just need to do a better job of giving back to that community.

So it’s in that spirit that I relaunch my blog. I’m positive I won’t be as prolific as many of my contemporaries, and I know I am not as insightful or intelligent as many of the people that I plan on profiling here in the future. However if I am able to share some of what I’ve learned over the course of my career and help those that are seeking to deepen their understanding of web design then I will consider it a success.

It also helps that I’ve switched to Jekyll to build my blog. I finally have the level of control over my HTML and CSS that I wanted. It allows me to build a simple, bare-bones blog that is a snap to maintain and publish with.

To give the blog a bit of a kickstart I’ve included some posts that have been pulled from a couple of my courses. Many of the posts come from my Jekyll for Web Designers course and I have also included a post on learning Git from my Github for Web Designers course. They should give you an idea of the type of content I plan on adding. I will also be doing good bit of personal posting, for reasons that will become clear in the near future.

Thank you for all of the support over the years and I’m looking forward to making this blog something worth reading.