Shadesofgrayden.com is finally back online after 10 months or so of "Eh, I'll get to it eventually" apathy. In its absense from the Internet, its Google ranking for the search term "Grayden" has fallen off the chart.
My maintenance of this site in general has more or less followed this trend. There was a time back during undergrad when I was very intent on keeping the site up to date and relevant, and I put a fair bit of effort into it. My photography section got lots of hits all the time, and I was proud that my little site was actually generating some traffic. Then I became a professional webmaster. Then my work sites became the focus of my web development life. Shadesofgrayden.com was just a little toy site that I kept going so I could have some claim to a corner of the Internet with my name on it. I was staking out land for which I had little intent to develop. Shadesofgrayden fell into disrepair in classic "Cobbler's Kids" style. If you're not familiar with that colloquialism, the saying goes that "the Cobbler's kids have no shoes". Basically, the professional takes care of everyone else's needs before placing any priority on his own needs. I spent quite a bit of time working on other people's websites, and not much of any on my own.
I've done quite a bit of web development in the last five years, and not many of the fruits of that labor have made it to this site. I think that once I get some time to sit down and seriously rework my content, I'll have to start actually showing off some of my content. I've done wholesale hand-rewrites of three and and a half major websites, I've written half a dozen stylesheets published under Creative Commons licenses, I've started to blog irregularly in a couple of places, and I've played around with learning some new languages.
Besides computer geekery, I've started to develop a fair bit of talent in some other pursuits, particularly swing dancing. Since this is pretty much a vanity site, I think I can make room for all of my hobbies, geeky or not.
As far as new categories go, I'm thinking of something like the following:
- About Me
- Resume
- About The Site
- Photography
- Print Design
- Video projects
- Classwork
- CSS Projects
- JavaScript Projects
- Portfolio
- Dance
- Aikido
- Travel
- Testimonials
- Finance