About ReidMR.com (the website)
This is a page with a little more about the actual website and business aspect for ReidMR.com (the website).
This site is an experiment. An experiment to find out what happens with being highly honest. What happens when we become highly transparent. How does society react? Should I be self conscious about it? How do friends react? How do family members react? Should I care? Does any of this really matter? I don't know the answer yet. In this case, this experiment may last my lifetime with how the Internet works. I hope it works well instead of a lifetime ruined.
So far, most people have not cared about it. I have found that with being transparent and open people are generally understanding and accepting of me. I have told many or most of my deepest secrets, but the world has hardly noticed. That which I thought was a big deal was only significant to me. As for anybody else: they hardly notice.
I have advocated transparency in government. While I am not a public figure (public servant) and am exempt from my transparency advocacy, I wondered what it would be like. It has been a very positive experience and I would recommend that the governments engage in radical transparency. It seems that many things the government thinks is a big deal and that the public cannot handle is hardly noticed or cared about. But when the public does care policy changes are very fast because the elected or appointed officials know what they are doing is unethical and that the public SHOULD care about and SHOULD know about those topics.
As for my experiment, in this case it will likely be much more permanent because of the way the Internet works. It is a risk I am willing to take and so far has been a very positive experience overall. There have been detractors and naysayers, but they are an exception. The gain, benefit, and enrichment to my life has been tremendous, far exceeding any negativity.
It is also about learning. Learning how to create a website. Leaning about Drupal. Learning how to create content people read. It has been a challenge. A wonderful challenge.
This website is another iteration in a chain of websites I have had since 2006. My first site was made using iWeb and was hosted on my universities servers. iWeb was discontinued so I moved it to Google. I wanted to learn more about web building and considered completely hand coding a website to learn more about HTML5. I discovered that would take way to long so considered using Wordpress or Drupal. Furthermore, I remembered what I had heard: there is no reason to redo something when there is already a better way to do it. An entire community had created something better exactly for this purpose. While Wordpress is a great platform and would have likely resulted in publishing faster I went with Drupal for the learning aspect and because my friend Sumedh suggested it. I felt that I could learn more about developing using that powerful and expandable platform and that it would afford more long term opportunities.
I bought a book about Drupal: The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, and started learning. It took well over a year of on and off work to learn how to properly build the website and then implement what I learned. I went through every article I had and completely reworked and updated them. I recorded new videos. I attempted to refrain from talking about what I was doing because I learned that sharing goals nearly ensures failure. For the last few months of the rewrite I was working over 20 hours a week on it. Finally I progressed enough to publish.
I must thank the authors of The Definitive guide to Drupal 7 and the Drupal community including the people who make the software, those who write instructions, and other users who post information about Drupal. They are the ones who are doing all of the hard work and posting their efforts. It takes a massive team of generous individuals so that people like myself can simply use the already excellent tools without much effort. This is the culmination of the efforts of thousands of people. Most of them I will never meet.
Enjoy,
Reid