New site, kevinsteinhardt.net

I’m proud to announce the publication of my new website, kevinsteinhardt.net. It’s been a good few weeks in the pipeline and with the help of my great friend Stephen Radford, my “personal and professional portfolio” is here!

The site is entirely Markdown-based, which makes writing content a hell of a lot easier and less stressful. I’m actually quite amazed at the rate I’ve been bashing out page after page on my commute – I’ve even got time to write this post!

Since I moved to the Netherlands, I’ve wanted to ditch my old site and start from scratch. The expiration of my hosting plan with Heart Internet (who are very very good hosting providers; don’t get me wrong) gave me a chance. I would like to extend my thanks to them for their services and excellent customer support over the years.

So the new site is up; and hopefully I’ll be adding bits and pieces in the coming weeks. Here’s to 2012 and the launch of kevinsteinhardt.net!

Introducing Plinky

I constantly begin blog posts with the pronoun “I” and I know a blog is definitionally “a personal journal [… which usually showcases] the work of a single individual” but just shut up about yourself, Kevin, for five minutes find it hard to come up with ideas for what to write about these days. I don’t really have a problem coming up for ideas for designs—earlier today in fact, I was really proud of my first drafts for the wholesale newsletter we at Mister B send out to our clients every week. But sometimes, all we need is a prompt and we’re on our way.

Let me introduce Plinky: a site currently managed by the team behind blogging platform WordPress, Automattic. While you can write and publish content directly from the site, I would be using it to generate a rough idea which I would then start hacking away at—yeah, that sounds an awful lot like stealing to me. It’s a shame there’s no random prompt feature built-in. Luckily, the permalink format is random number generation-friendly: insert a number ($) into the URL
http://www.plinky.com/prompts/$/answers/new
and Bob’s your uncle. I hope to be using it to overcome my acute writer’s block over the coming weeks. Expect posts on whether or not ghosts exist (they don’t) and how I got to where I am today.

Actually, that second one might be a good one to start with.