My name is Martin Haywood. I’ve been writing this blog for around a decade, even though the earliest post dates don’t reflect that. When I started the pages were static and only people far more tied up in the internet than I then was actually knew what a “blog” was. But I could write HTML, why did I need to get one of these newfangled content management systems? I’d write my thoughts freeform as the markup language intended! And so I did, but it was tiresome, so I taught myself to program PHP so I could write a CMS for my own use. Then I taught myself more PHP so I could write a real, modular, powerful CMS. And it wasn’t very powerful but it got the job done. It was something, though, it was a pain in the arse to maintain. So eventually I gave up and just pulled in wordpress – the easy option I’d been too stubborn to follow before then. I’d also signed up on Newsvine, and I was doing a lot of crossposting between newsvine and this blog – primarily newsvine was my online presence but I wanted to keep something that I controlled which held all my thoughts. I’m glad I did because NV succumbed eventually to the trolls and I left. Not before making a lot of friends and greatly improving my writing, though. And eventually going back to Uni and doing a philosophy degree to add to my science degree. By now I was working as a programmer, again.
Several of the people I met through newsvine had become really close friends, particularly Celestina. My wife and I invited Celestina and her husband to come visit us in Tasmania, and soon we had travelled back and forth between there and Asheville, NC, eventually deciding to all go into business (web programming) in Asheville. Which is how Ponderwell was born; a terribly productive and happy time in my life but one which sadly curtailed my time for writing on here.
Well, that came to an end with my diagnosis with Pancreatic cancer (late May 2012). There are a series of group emails out there somewhere which loosely document my struggles with that disease, and after some time has passed I might prevail on Celestina to concatenate them and post them here, just for completeness. I know when I was first reading about the disease there were things I’d like to have known which I’ve mentioned in those emails. Perhaps in a year? 6 months? enough for everyone close to me to have forgotten the process – I don’t want their posting to remind people who would rather forget.
Thank you, readers.
My online presence is approximately:
dj3huty.tumblr.com (collected bits of stuff from around the web)
facebook
Google+ under Martin Haywood.
And I guess that’s about it.