Once we'd had the site up for a couple of weeks so I thought it was time to post an "About" page.
While I do have a vision of what I want to do here, I'm sort of making it up as I go along, trying to follow the Ruby-ish YAGNI ( You Ain't Gonna Need It ) principle when constructing the site. My goal is to build a site that takes minimal upkeep effort. I'm pretty sure that you've figured that out.
Jim ... for $DEITY's sake, what site-generation platform is this?
After using other more elaborate tools, I ended up building a simple static site generator that I call Chilidog. I've been using it for a private blog for a while. I recently began using it for my main site at jimlawless.net and at my Stray Pointers Podcast site at straypointers.com. It keeps things simple. Enough about the tooling ... let's talk about the site.
The Vision
I've been a computing hobbyist for about 45 years. In that time, I have used a number of computers. I began with a TRS-80 Model I as my first computer. I had various Commodore 8-bit computers, an Amiga 500, and then a series of Intel/MS-DOS/Windows PC's and such. I got into Macs a bit later than most, but I have a couple here. I have the mini versions of the C-64, Atari 400, and Amiga 500. I tinkered with Apple II's quite a bit at school.
I enjoy writing and I like old computing tech so this site is my attempt to centralize those interests for me and to share them with others.
SN ERROR?
I think there might be confusion in the terminology I am using for the site, though. I refer to the root page as "the newsfeed" in the Quick Links section at the bottom of every page. There's another folder under the /p/ URI that holds what I refer to as "permanent" posts. The newsfeed is supposed to be reatively short-lived. It'll cycle off and I'll archive the contents by date at some point. The posts, however, are meant to stay around so that they can be referenced.
I only have an RSS feed here jumptable.net/feed.xml for the root page. I'll announce updates from the permanent page there so those who subscribe using the syndication feed should be made aware of them.
"by any other name"...
How did I come up with the domain name jumptable.net. In assembly language programming, jump tables are constructs of jump instructions ... (akin to GOTO's in BASIC and other languages ) where each line is a separate jump. The given program utilizes this construct so that it has an indexed referenced to a subroutine. If writing out the character held in the A register is function 4, then the code can always call the 4th entry in the jump table, which would actually then jump to the routine that fulfills the request. This is because subroutines move around in memory and end up with different addresses as code is modified. But a table of jumps are constant.
Commodore has used this technique for years so that if you see a JSR $FFD2 in code on a KIM-1, 6502 PET, VIC-20, C-64, C-16, +4, or C-128 you know that the character in A will be displayed at the next position on the screen. The instruction at $FFD2 is always a jump instruction that jumps to the actual address of the routine for that particular machine and that particular release of the given KERNAL ROM's.
When I thought about people visiting the root page and immediately clicking other links to go elsewhere, I thought a jump table was an apt metaphor.
Have fun!
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