My first foray into Internet consultancy was in 1998, under the guise of PT Internet, but it was short-lived as I took up a full-time post a few months later. However, wanting to maintain some online foothold, I bought the domain ptworld.net. I naively assumed that a .net domain could denote an association with any kind of Internet services, whereas, at the time, it was intended for organisations involved in networking infrastructure or Internet Service Providers. However, after a few years, with the proliferation of top-level domains, such a specific association faded away and I eventually got round to create a website, but sadly it became quite neglected until this year ...
After months of preparation, I’m pleased (and relieved) to have launched a renewed website, up-to-date and providing extensive coverage of what I’m about – especially in terms of research and software development, and my experience. The site’s navigation reflects the interdisciplinary nature; hyperlinks are used liberally to allow ease of movement between the more theoretical research topics concerning Buddhist ethics to more practical perspectives such as cognitive interventions using thinking routines. Regarding software development, I try to take a historical perspective when solving problems, which I incorporate also in my portfolio. Alternatively, connections on a given themes may be explored via the tags or the use of the search facility.
The banner image is a photograph I took whilst living in Doha. It depicts the Corniche, with promotional slogans in English and Arabic. The complete set (in English) is ‘Think’, ‘Realize’ and ‘Achieve’ — remember that Arabic is read from right to left. Certainly, they have already achieved a great deal for a small state and the World Cup is arriving very soon. It serves partly as a prompt to myself to persevere and keep the dream alive, as it were. I’m not so good at self-promotion, but at this juncture the website is primarily an invitation to help nurture a viable business to support Sigala, a project that I have researched extensively. The project needs to convincingly answer the question of why it’s a good investment. How can the trusted network be leveraged to generate income ... ?
In terms of roadmap, there remains the need for a proof of concept. Whilst I’ve established that Symfony is capable of delivering prototypes, I have found that consolidating all the project strands has been quite an undertaking and have not yet progressed this. It may be better for someone else to do the coding, so with that in mind my next step will be to create mockups.
Another reason for the delay has been a detour, which led to a mini project in itself to address the problem of delivering a faster and more secure public-facing website. You may notice with the ptworld.net site, that URLs typically end in ‘index.html’, which means they are static pages, with no processing overhead from scripts or database queries to deliver the content. All being well, you should notice that translates to faster page loads in your web browser. The software responsible for delivering such pages – the result of this mini project – is MakeStaticSite, a set of Bash shell scripts released under the AGPL license, invoking popular GNU tools such as wget and rsync to generate and deploy with various options a static site. It’s an age-old problem, but my focus has been on deploying live sites rather than creating archives, and is aimed especially at converting sites made in WordPress, though it works generally with any site accessible via http.
Many developers consider WordPress retro, old or out of date, and prefer more modern approaches that are unconstrained by such a monolithic architecture and thus replete with possibilities. But whether making WordPress headless or dispensing with WordPress altogether, it is acknowledged that it carries with it a significant technical overhead for development and maintenance. I doubt that many individuals and small organisations are concerned about the constraints of themes; they will be happy enough if there’s a nice-looking result that clearly conveys the nature of their activities and will reach the intended audience. WordPress already satisfies their needs, so for them, at least, MakeStaticSite can allow this to continue whilst providing the additional benefit of delivering a safer and faster public-facing site.
MakeStaticSite is already quite functional and I can see many possible improvements, but I need to move on as time is really limited. If only I had a good and capable team at my disposal ...
