About this site

The Name

So what is “sentient food” anyway? Well, on the face, it is thinking food, but that doesn’t really answer the question, does it? Aside from being inspired by Douglas Adams, it comes from one of my first short stories, “Food for Thought”, the same place where the pseudonym porruka comes from. While the ‘nym comes from the race of creatures, sentient food is what they are.

Now, aren’t you glad you asked?

The Publishing System

At this point, anyone who cares has already noticed this is being published with WordPress. Woo hoo!

Anyway, it has not always been that way. In the process of bringing up the site using this tool, I am letting go (mostly) of a self-created publishing system written 10 years ago in support of the original MacEdition site. At that time, open source CMS really hadn’t come into its own, and “real” publishing systems were just too damned expensive, so I wrote one. Timed publishing, automatic index generation, templated article and site-page foundations, user logins, article approvals, the whole thing.

Well, the “whole thing” is not strictly true; for MacEdition, I stayed as far from the templates themselves as I could, being a code geek and most definitely not a css/design geek. All the credit (and more) goes to the people I worked with on that site for how good it looked (and how well it validated,… over 10 years ago!).

When the time came to bring up Sentient Food the first time, I took my pubsys, a little ugly CSS knowledge, and there it was, and there it has been. Until now. I’m still looking for the “look” I want, but that’s ok; pushing the bits to the pages through WordPress is nice (it means I don’t have to write an RSS generator for my old system). Having someone else write an iPhone app so I can monitor and manage from afar? Spec-tac-ular!

If you’ve reached this part of the page, my condolences. This is likely far more than you originally bargained for to know.