My first web site was started back in 1995 and was located at ibm.com/patrick (IBM was kind enough to maintain the link when I e-tired at the end of 2001). People often asked me how I was able to get a web address so close to the top of the company. The best answer I can offer is that back then people did not know much about the Internet and the web. We were all on a steep learning curve. Since I was out giving speeches about the Future of the Internet and people were calling my office asking how they could get copies of my slides it made sense to build a web site and make the materials publicly available. Walking the talk It was a policy that served me well for years to come.
In July of 2002 I moved ibm.com/patrick to my own personal web site at johnpatrick.com. Beginning in 1997 I began to blog about various topics — I called the postings “reflections“. They remain here on patrickWeb. Initially the tool of choice for writing was Lotus Internotes to do the writing and posting but then I experimented with various new blogging tools that were springing up. In July 2003 I switched to Movable Type. I thought it was the ultimate but have now decided to change to WordPress. For my needs it is a clearly superior tool and will save me hours in what I do. As a reader you will not see much difference initially. As I gain expereince with WordPress I plan to integrate it more tightly with patrickWeb. As things unfold you will see a much richer archive with categories and tags, books recently read, better search, and an overall improved look and feel. I hope to have all this completed over the next month or so.
On infrequent occasions I have something to say about the technical aspects of patrickWeb. Most readers will not care about this but for those who do care, patrickWeb will continue to use the Atom protocol to publish the index of what I write. There is a debate in technical circles about what protocol to use — RSS or Atom. For the most part the issues are technical. Both protocols accomplish the same thing — they provide an index that allows blog reading software, such as Google Reader, to be able to display the date, title, category or categories, and the content of what I write. I believe that Atom is a better long term approach but I will continue to publish in both Atom and RSS.
For those readers who are interested in exactly where the new feeds are you can find them as follows…
- RSS feed is at https://www.johnpatrick.com/feed/
- Atom feed is at https://www.johnpatrick.com/feed/atom/
For those who read patrickWeb from the homepage no action is required and for those receiving the stories from Feedblitz via email there should be no interruption. As always, I greatly appreciate feedback about patrickWeb, especially if you find a broken link or an error of any kind. Suggested improvements in look or feel are also appreciated and thanks for reading patrickWeb.
