About

Contact

You can email me at veganstraightedge@gmail.com or find me on most social networks with the username @veganstraightedge. Twitter, Instagram, GitHub.

Currently

I’m still vegan, still straightedge. I’m an anarchist without adjectives. And I’m trying to be a polymath. I have aphantasia, which means I can't see (or hear or smell or feel) things in my mind. I'm in my fourties.

I’ve been building websites in some form or another since 1995. Today, I’m a programmer and designer, for fun and for profit.

Lately, I’ve been painting and playing music a little bit again. I’ve started writing fiction, but haven’t finished any drafts yet. My ADHD gives me lots of new ideas and lots of energy at the start, but then diminishes over time.

Currently, I’m living in a house that I bought in Portland, Oregon, where I’m slowly becoming more of a carpenter.

Previously

For several years, I lived in a 1903 farmhouse in Hollywood, California that I named “The Farmhouse” in Hollywood, CA. It was home to my dog Civ and I, a rotating cast of friends and sometimes roommates. For some time, the living room served as a private co-working space for a few of us who all happened to be working in open source at the same time. The big backyard had a barn (carriage house), five fruit trees, a wall of prickly pear cactus, and a 100+ year old avocado tree in it. I buried Civ under that tree after she died at 14 years old.

Underneath that tree, in that backyard, and in the barn, I organized and hosted five Farmhouse Confs and one Barn Talks. The barn later was home to an up and coming florist.

After the owner of my house sold it and the neighbors to developer, my LA days were over. I used the negotiated eviction money to buy a 1987 Volkswagen Vanagon named #LittleMisadventureTime. My then girlfriend and I spent eighteen months living full time in the eighty square feet and traveling aroudn the U.S.

Colophon

This website was first created 2003. It has been powered by many things over they years. At first, it was a series of static hand-written HTML files. Then in late 2004, the first CMS that I used was WordPress in the very early days… pre-themes! After a couple few versions of self-hosted WordPress, I migrated to WordPress.com to not deal with being a sysadmin anymore.

In 2005, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails 1.0. It changed my life. While I made several other things, I didn’t build my blog in Rails until Summer 2010. Ever since then, it’s been powered by some custom CMS built in Rails. Around that time, I had gotten involved with the IndieWeb community and was building my site through the lens of #indieweb principles.

I tried to make an “indieweb WordPress built in Rails”. It was first called Homesteading, then Dark Matter. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it alone and couldn’t get others to collaborate with me enough to get it past a hobbyist CMS to a general purpose app for “non-technical users”. In the mid-2010s, I dropped the aspirations of making it for other people, and now “Dark Matter::Publisher” is just my personal website CMS.

These days, it runs on Heroku, is backed by Postgres, and is built using the latest versions of Ruby, Rails, Bootstrap.

I have used a few of domains over the years. theresistancearmy.com, iamshane.com, sbb.me. Then I was finally able to get ahold of veganstraightedge.com which matches my username everywhere else. veganstraightedge.com is my forever domain.

PS. If you own s.bb or work in the Barbados registrar and can help me get it, please email me.