Rourke's Random Musings

This website has been a mess recently. Up, down, errors on the main page. Random items showing up new in the feed. All the old posts showing up new in the feed. I apologize. I’m done messing around, and things should work properly from this point forward.

I started this blog about a year ago. Initially, I just wanted a place to stick things so I’d be able to share them with friends and so I’d be able to find those things again later. From there, I started posting longer articles on products and services that I was really happy with. In December, at work, we launched TIBCO ActiveMatrix and I wrote about that a few times. Slowly, folks found my site and the traffic grew to about 70 unique visitors per day and 50 feed subscribers. Co-workers found the site and people started to mention it when I ran into them in the hallways.

With all this attention, I took a look at my site. Frankly, I was a little embarrassed. The site was painfully slow, the design was awful, and the content was all over the place. Looking around at some of the other sites out there, I had some ideas. I didn’t have the time or knowledge to do what I really wanted, but I did manage to improve things. The major changes include:

• faster web host
• latest version of Wordpress
• new site design
• separation of content into “sub-blogs”

As a result, things should work properly and I’m happy enough with the site that I’m comfortable posting content here again. Looking at what I was writing about, and looking at what people were interested in, I divided the site into three “sub-blogs”: (1) SOA, (2) Technology, and (3) Random Junk. If you’re interested in my technology related posts, just check out rourkem.com/tech. If you liked the SOA and TIBCO related posts, check out rourkem.com/soa. If you really want to read my food and travel related posts, there’s always rourkem.com/random. Of course, there’s always rourkem.com if you really want to read all of the above.

For each of the above sub-blogs, there’s a corresponding feed. Take a look at the above-listed pages and shift your subsciptions if one of the specific feeds is more appropriate to what you’re interested in. If you’re currently subscribed to the main site feed and only want the latest SOA posts, for example, go to rourkem.com/soa and subscribe to the feed listed in the sidebar on that page.

I’m not very happy with the theme, but it’s an improvement. Given the time, I’d love to build a new Wordpress theme based off Sandbox. For now, though, this should work.