My name is Alex Charlton. This is my website.

I suppose a first post should be a manifesto of sorts. Perhaps not, but saying that you wrote a manifesto sounds kind of cool. So here goes:

• I am going to learn things.
• I will share some of the things that I learn on this site.
• The result will be a big party.

So... that was a little weak. But that's okay. I think I got my point across.

My goal for this site is reflected in its design. This isn't just a simple blog. The articles that I write that are instructional in nature (or otherwise, I suppose) will go in the Library section of this site. This separate section for articles will place them outside the chronology that is forced on a blog, and I will take advantage of this by updating them as I learn more about a certain topic or as information changes. Same goes for the Downloads section which is where I will be putting any code or programs I create. The News is a traditional blog. It has an RSS feed and will be updated whenever I create or update any content, or whenever I feel like opening up a discussion, as it is the only section with comments.

So without further ado, I present to you... some content! I figured that my first topic of discussion may as well be this website, so my first download is blog.lua: the database-free backend to this site, written in Lua, which anyone is free to use or modify. My first article, Setting up Kepler, details how one gets Kepler - the Lua web development platform used by blog.lua - running in a shared hosting environment.

As the code I wrote as well as the platform I used is discussed at length in those sections, I'll just mention one more thing: By not using any database, I'm able to organize the content of this site in a local Mercurial repository and by pushing that repo to this server I get an automatic, securely updating CMS for free! Pretty awesome, but I'm not the first to do it. I just wanted to point out how easy it was to make this work. I was creating the code for the website in a Mercurial repository anyways, so having a separate one for content was really no extra effort and yields some great benefits. It's certainly worth consideration if you're someone who is used to working with some form of distributed revision control and you plan on making a site that has a lot of write once, modify never (or rarely) data.

Alright, party time!