About
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 “about” page originally served as my single-page first draft/iteration. The site you are viewing is my second iteration, which has some additional features to be found by clicking on the ‘+’ sign in the top right corner of the page.
My Work
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.
I am passionate about connecting students and teachers with the best resources and making resources ever more accessible and discoverable, whether that means a physical copy of a not-as-well-known-as-it-should-be middle grade fantasy novel or the latest digital learning tool on a classroom Chromebook.
You can see some of my work at granitemedia.org, www.graniteschools.org/edtech, on social media channels such as @edtechgsd and @librarymediagsd, and in other library and content management systems accessible only to students and staff in the district.
My Family
I am husband of Virginia and father of two children who do not yet have web presences. (I may help them with that soon.)
My Writing
I am an occasional writer. The new iteration of this site will come to incorporate writings 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 going forward 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 share and retweet a lot of library, children’s literature, and educational technology kinds of things related to my work, although I’ve been kind of quiet lately.
My Reading
I keep track of my own reading and follow the reading of my friends and colleagues on Goodreads. Feel free to friend me there.
When I read children’s or young adult literature I try to make it a habit to write a review, and when I do I always publish the review first on Granite Media, which is my district’s library media site and home for book reviews from school librarians, teachers, and students.
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.
Other Places You Can Find Me
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 this 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 also intend to incorporate photos directly into this site; that’s a 3rd draft/iteration feature.
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. My wife is a Pinterest power user, and I linked to her profile above.
I love the idea of location-based social media, but I don’t like the reality of Swarm all that much. Nonetheless, I do use it occasionally. I still miss Gowalla. If you know of a good location-based platform for documenting travel or visits to interesting places, please share it with me.
About this Project
I’m using this site 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 second draft/iteration using the W3.CSS framework to build out custom theming and templating for the the Hugo static site generator, hosting the final product via Github and Netlify.
My next step will be building out a template and multi-page publishing capabilities, likely with Jekyll. My next steps will be creating a custom taxonomy, fully indiewebifying this site, and more navigational features, and possibly incorporating a photo blog section. I’m also thinking about building a hyper-narcissitic, cross-platform lifestream/microblog with Known and/or Micro.blog.
WP51
Yes, I am trying for a vaguely Wordperfect 5.1 aesthetic. 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. It was already an ancient computer even then. Fonts are currently IBM Plex Mono and Merriweather Serif, both via Google Fonts.