Reignite my blogging passion

My old blog fat monty, has been long retired and I felt a strong impetus to start a fresh reincarnation of it. So here I am again - new name and new blog.

Since this is the initial post I feel that I should mention my old blog and take the time to explain the rise and demise of this blogs predecessor. Firstly the name, and origins thereof. Choosing a domain name in the current age of an internet addicited society, with almost 2 billion internet web sites existing as of 2019, is tough, that is, if you want to stand out. Of course, you could buy www.anotherwebsitewithalongstupidname.com for only £10 / year, and whilst it is a dot com, it is not exactly short and snappy. After a good few hours searching for a unique and short domain name (has to be dot com!), and after considering whether to piggyback on other sites for blogging, I thought of my old cat, Monty. Monty was a rather rotund feline, though not largely overweight, describing him as fat would not be untrue. Whilst it is not the most affectionate way to describe a beloved pet, I thought it would serve quite well as a domain name, short and catchy. Sadly Monty was neither of those things, he was quite tall and refused to chase or catch anything (toy or mouse). For the cost of £10 / year, fatmonty.com was mine to use as I wished.

I set it up and used Wordpress to make it look shiny and put some simple content on there. After a few initial and short posts (never exceeding 10 minute reads) I became largely uninterested in updating it, and saw it as more of a burden. After a year of continuous WordPress updates and comment approvals I sought to retire it, beside the fact that GoDaddy suddenly increased hosting and maintenance costs. It lived and it died, and I doubt anyone cared.

Several lessons have been learnt from my maiden exploration in blogging.

• Don't use GoDaddy
• Don't waste time with CSS and styling - content over presentation.
• Content must be useful and meaningful - longer content and less opinions
• Include better figures, images, code snippets
• More appropriate domain name

Taking all these notes on board I hope that physicstom.com will fulfill my passion for outreach, showcasing, and teaching. In addition by using a new platform and framework to build my blog (using Gatsby with AWS hosting) it allows me to use React (the greatest thing since toast for web development) and is far cheaper than my previous setup. And with the name change I am focused on tailoring posts and applications to a more physics and mathematics related agenda. My only hope is that version 0.2 will last longer than verion 0.1.

The next thing is to write some actual exciting content. That will take some time, until then, I will follow this up with a post from my old blog.

Oh and here is a picture of Monty the cat sitting on the window sill of my old apartment.

Written by Thomas Stainer who likes to develop software for applications mainly in maths and physics, but also to solve everyday problems. Check out my GitHub page here.