I've had the "samharrelson.com" domain since 2006 and I've used it as the primary site of my personal blog since that time. I've also had my personal email there (along with a set of paid Google Apps which I've just recently moved away from). However, I started considering whether or not I could move my family to some sort of .harrelson domain that would stay in our family's possession, complete with backend storage for photos, files and memories. That would eliminate my/our reliance on corporations promising not to be evil or companies willing to brashly make decisions for me. Also, I'm looking to do something along similar lines with student blogs/digital portfolios in my 8th Grade Science class over at Griffin Science. Basically, I'd like to equip each student with a subdomain that would have either a Wordpress install or point to a blogging/site service of the student's choosing. So, each kid would have sam.griffinscience.com for perpetuity (if they'd like) but they'd certainly be able to have a copy of their work for the year. So, I came up with the harrelson.fm (on a Media Temple server) idea as sort of a test bed for GriffinScience as well as a way to scratch the indy itch I've had about my family's data. On Twitter, Margaret made the excellent suggestion that .fm could be short for ".family" which I think is just fantastic. If you check out harrelson.fm, you'll see links to Anna, our daughters (and my parents in the coming days). They've each got a large web disk that's triple backed up online and offline, an email account like sam@harrelson.fm and they can either have a blog/site install or go with a cname pointer (which is what Anna did). We also have a family calendar up (nifty Webcalendar install) as well as a family photo gallery and a shared file for docs, budgets, etc. I also get to admin my parents' email and sites/blogs (hope they do blog). I'm excited to see how this works and eventually how it works for GriffinScience. I'm a firm believer in having a central (and independent... corporate free) hub of presence on the web. Hopefully this will be my answer. Now if I can only get in on Dave Winer's Scripting2 experiment so I can take things to a whole different level of blogging and presence! 04e149af6db14524b6ce47d8b22e9b84

Paul Rand (one of my heroes):

"Perception—how we see something—is always conditioned by what we are looking for, and why. In this way we are always faced with questions of value. A turbine must be "scientifically" designed in order to operate, but to design it at all was at one time a matter of decision. Such decisions mayor may not be based on needs, but they are surely based on wants. Products do not have to be beautifully designed. Things can be made and marketed without our considering their aesthetic aspects, ads can convince without pleasing or heightening the spectator's visual awareness. But should they? The world of business could, at least for a while, function without benefit of art—but should it? I think not, if only for the simple reason that the world would be a poorer place if it did."

I'm really enjoying being back on a self-hosted Wordpress powered blog. Sure, having upgrades and bandwidth issues taken care of behind-the-scenes is nice, but there's nothing like plowing through a sidebars.php file or questioning what you really want in a header or footer file. Plus, I love Coda and Textmate and MarsEdit, which are the primary tools I use to sculpt out this digital David (it's a work in progress). One of the toughest parts of finding Wordpress (or blog in general) nirvana, of course, is nailing the right theme. To be honest, I can't stand busy themes (or classrooms or office spaces). My design ethic is definitely minimalistic. However, finding that perfect minimalistic blog is so challenging. I've been toying with the ultra-thin "mnmlist" theme here. It does what I want a theme to do; focus the reader on the content and allow for the reader to formulate their own experience with the text rather than be constrained by an experience I am attempting to thrust upon them with chicklets, images and heat-map derived colors. I'm going to give this theme and this experiment a try. There will be a little tweaking here and there as I break in these new shoes, but feel free to let me know your thoughts (sam@samharrelson.com or Twitter work fine).

I've finally done it.