I guess I should kick off my initial blog post with “Hi, Mom!”

Beyond her and my wife and maybe a couple of co-workers, I’m not sure who’s going to be reading this.

Anyway, welcome to the new site! This is, not counting the earliest “meet the new baby” sites I built, my fourth personal portfolio website. Those are the first three creations up there. Nice, huh?

Craig’s Corner of the Web: Fun hand-drawn image map main navigation with links for samples of my work and pictures of the family.

Version No. 2: I’m a serious graphic artist. Here are Photoshop cutouts showing my talents and interests. Here are some badges to show you I’m comfortable with the technology of the day.

Third time’s a charm: I’m better at design and layout. I have 3D illustration skills. I’m trying to get a comic strip published.

Really, they were all fine for what they were intended to be at the time. I mostly needed a place I could point people toward to see samples of my work. Problem was, I’d put a lot of initial effort into building them and getting them online, and then … that was pretty much it. I wouldn’t touch them again.

Generally the thing that motivates me to work on a personal website is the prospect of looking for a new job, either because I fear I’m in danger of being downsized or because I want to move back to Iowa (that was really a one-time motivation).

So what’ll be different with this one? I’m hoping the inclusion of a blog will get me to work on it a bit more. Not that I think anyone wants to read my rambling thoughts on anything. I just think it would help me become a better developer if I write about it. And writing about it would help me become a better writer, which is not a bad thing.

Among the things I want to write about: building this site; porting some of my PHP-MySQL apps to static pages (for display in my portfolio section); my experience working with Vue JS and Svelte; and experiments in javascript and CSS.

Beyond the blogging, I intend to add to the portfolio pages and possibly find a place for my two attempts at getting a comic strip published.

So however you stumbled upon this page, I hope you’ll have a look around and check back in the future for more. Thanks for reading.