Welcome! I am building this web site as a place to collect and share things I'm working on, as well as my random obsessions. This is a single-page first draft in active development.
I am a digital content manager for the library media program and educational technology department of a large public school district. I catalog, curate, document, promote, and support library and technology resources for students and staff. You can see some of my work at granitemedia.org, www.graniteschools.org/edtech, and in other library and content management systems accessible only to students and staff in the district.
I am husband of Virginia and father of two children who do not yet have web presences. (I may help them with that soon.)
I am an occasional writer. The next iteration of this site will incorporate some of my writing from my once and future blogs. The old sites are forlorn, neglected things, and I actually don't feel comfortable linking to them at this point. Reintegrating them and having a nice place to share writing is at the heart of why I am building this site.
The past few years I've been most likely to share thoughts or links to my writing on twitter, at @jdwhiting. I also retweet a lot of library, educational technology, and children's literature kinds of things related to my work.
I keep track of my own reading and follow the reading of my friends and colleagues on goodreads.
I'm a member and chair of the Children's Fiction committee of the Children's Literature Association of Utah. We determine the shortlist nominees for the Beehive Book Awards, which kids and teens throughout Utah vote upon to determine winners.
I obsessively and meticulously document all the music I listen to via last.fm. The Universal Scrobbler enables me in this endeavor.
I'm trying to learn more about film and watch more movies, and I document that at letterboxd.
I sometimes take random pictures with my phone. Long before instagram, I once fancied myself an interesting photographer. I may get there again.
I always have it in mind to eventually do something more with Pinterest than I am currently doing, such as using it to explore and curate more art and photography.
I love the idea of location-based social media, but I don't like the reality of Swarm all that much, although I do use it occasionally. I still miss Gowalla.
I'm using this page to learn more about web development and design. I'm tired of silos and bloated content management systems, so I'm trying to be more DIY and indieweb. This is a first draft/iteration using the W3.CSS framework and free hosting on Github Pages. My next step will be building out a template and multi-page publishing capabilities, likely with Jekyll. I'm also thinking about building a hyper-narcissitic, cross-platform lifestream/microblog with Known and/or Micro.blog.
Yes, I am trying for a vaguely Wordperfect 5.1 aesthetic, thanks for asking. I think I'm doing this because it puts me back to when I was a tween writing things and creating stuff on an old 286 in the basement. Even then it was an ancient computer. Fonts are IBM Plex Mono and Merriweather, both via Google Fonts.