For years I struggled with what exactly I should put on my webpages, and for years they remained just black and white pages of lifeless text with my phone number or as you may have seen, the b&w jumping dolphin with the corny action pose. Maybe black and white are the signature colors of my generation. I just could not organize my ideas into some cohesive and graphically moving system which I thought might be appropriate for a personal website, but then something wonderful happened – Baby spoke.

Baby’s first word was sublime, beautiful, and showed he neither had understanding nor appreciation for my black and white world which predated iPhones, touch-screens, and e-commerce. Baby was born a native user of technology, and just as our spoken language is a human instinct, so was an entirely new language being modeled and experimented with in Baby’s mind from his first days. Baby was born bilingual, and as he developed phrases of our spoken language, the simple phrases and expressions of a new language also formed – the language of server scripting. Baby’s first word was not “mama” or “juice” it was simply –  WordPress.

WordPress is web-publishing platform built with everything you might expect in a blog. I wanted to find some way of just hanging out all the interesting bits and pieces of my life without having to spend too much time organizing it into something logical, or dazzling from beginning to end. It had to be flexible and make sense as something that was constantly evolving. Fortunately for me, the blog format, its simplicity, and WordPress are a perfect fit for this. It’s like one big yard sale. You haul all your crap out out of the garage, and let people pick through it on your front lawn.

WordPress just may be the most important contribution to web-publishing during its brief but explosive history. It is open to everyone, free, open source, and has the vision possible only by the young generation natively fluent in techno-communication. I doubt any of the developers of this masterpiece are over 19. It has the simplicity of a pre-school toy, the mind-bending flexibility of a yogi, and the power of an F1 racer. There are countless contributions of add-ons, themes, and styles available from a diverse group of users. It is totally editable on the fly, so whether a user is content to just click all the buttons, or do some performance tuning under the hood, there is no limit to what it can do. My yard sale has begun. I’m hanging out the old brass lamp and seeing if someone will pay a nickel for it, and there’s more to come.