I considered starting my own blog for quite a while now, but just never seemed to get around to it.  Besides, there seemed to be just too many blogs out there already. Before putting “pen to paper” I really needed to seriously consider what contribution I could really make to the overabundance of often-useless content that exists already. Plus, who would be reading me anyway?  And if I did start posting, could I be as entertaining and informative as those that I enjoy reading, such as cyncerely.com or snipe.net?  Or did I at least have something worthwhile to say?  It was all too easy to come up with reasons to not bother with any of this.

On the other hand, I did have some rationalizations (however small they may have been) for starting a blog. For starters (no pun intended), I had registered the domain name iangoldstein.com back in January of 2001, but never had any really good plans for it.  Perhaps it’s petty, but I just didn’t like the idea that someone else could register my name as their domain name. To be fair, I’ve always known there are other Ian Goldstein’s out there, but since none of  us had registered it yet, I figured it might as well be me.  Eventually I knew I’d put something on this site, and a blog was starting to look more and more like the right idea.

Sometimes several things in the world come together at the right time, and it becomes hard to ignore the obvious. A few months ago I began the planning for a major upgrade of my hosting systems, and much of the details of this project seemed like perfect blog material.  On top of this, a friend and I are in the process of putting together material for a separate website — stay tuned for more info on that — that would also probably be best served as a blog. And then, I met up with an old friend of mine from college who convinced me I really should take a good look at WordPress.

Well, I did.

After looking at WordPress, as they say, the rest is history. I was very impressed (and for those who know me, when it comes to software, that’s a very hard thing to do). I knew pretty quickly that I would be using it for some pending projects. In the end, this blog was setup in part to be my first WordPress project.

So, what types of post can you expect to see here? While this is certainly a work in progress, at least for now I have plans to write about…

• hosting and programming related issues, in the hopes it will help others
• photography related subjects, as it is a passion of mine
• wine, and wine making, another passion and hobby of mine
• other topics that just don’t fit elsewhere

Stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say soon.