Reboot Sequence Initiated

Over the past few days, I have been challenged to take an introspective look at myself as to exploring my strong desire for writing and how to do it best. I have blown off the dust of this old blog that has been around for a few years and began adding more content to it. I’ve concluded that I suffered from a sheer lack of focus.

What kind of blog did I want? I did not really know, I just threw whatever against the wall and was curious what would stick. This blog is in my own name, and I feel like I am such a diverse person with so many interests, Sup-a-Dillie-O summed it best:

…but I want to write about EVERYTHINGZZZZ!!!!!

Part of rebooting this blog over the past couple of days, I discovered I had many under performing categories with one or two posts. The trail of evidence showed the various directions I wanted my blog to go. There are so many things that I wanted to be respected and known for.

For example, among my family they tease me for being frugal (ahem, cheap), so I was going to start a series entitled “tales of frugality”. That only made it to one post, and that was the end of that. The thought was that people are always looking at ways to stretch a dollar further. Perhaps, I was just not as committed to that as I once thought.

I have a fascination for end of the world events and preparing or living in a post-apocalyptic world. There are survival blogs out there doing very well, so I had started a category entitled “cataclysm”. That idea also fell flat on it’s face.

Clearly, trying to cover every interest that I have was going to be a really tough task. What kind of confused audience was I hoping to draw out of this? Looking back, it was definitely time to focus.

I distilled many categories down to a select few that I really enjoy quite a bit, and would not mind concentrating on. The posts that have done very well on my site were in both in presenting solutions to technical problems that I struggled with and my occasional photography.

By trade, I am a Linux systems engineer that has now moved into information security. I also have a huge passion for developing web sites. As a result, I am a professional web hacker or web penetration tester. I am also taking my previous systems engineer knowledge to perform network penetration testing as well.

Information security is a non-stop process of learning. Consistently the professionals at SANS Institute constantly urge us alumni to propagate the knowledge we have learned there to others. The weakest link to any system is the human, rather it is the user or the engineers and developers building the system.

I take an active part in WordPress Orlando through organization and speaking. Last year I gave a talk about securing WordPress sites. I am looking forward to the opportunity to speak in front of the group again to deliver even more value for the community to protect their sites against potential threats. My dream is to be a great ethical hacker and through that I believe I can find my niche in the WordPress community.

I still love photography, every chance I can get to use my Nikon DSLR or even my iPhone 5S to take pictures, I do. Most of them have been living on Instagram these days, but this is an opportunity to bring them back here and post them. While I am writing out this article, I’m starting to begin to think that having a “photography” category may be working towards the detriment and creating a split focus.

I am off to a good start with streamlining the site. I filtered many categories down to a few and I may not be finished there yet. I fell in love with the sheer basic nature of the 2015 WordPress theme, so I selected that and removed all widgets except for the category display. I threw out the idea of spending time hunting down the perfect featured image by not having one. I refined the blog down to just my content and the act of clicking the publish button.