It’s Alive!
I finally completed the first increment of a dutch website for my company Living Software. This one has been on my backlog for quite some time. The english company site will remain at willemvandenende.com.
The main value I hope to get from this site, is that I noticed it isn’t clear (even to some people I know) how I work, that I have my own company and services etc – I hope this clears it up. Other value is, that I noticed not everyone that attends our courses is 100% comfortable with doing everything in english, and sinds this "agile" stuff stil is spreading slowly in the netherlands, I thought I’d give another site on coaching, training and agile in dutch a shot. (This is the third time I’m doing it. First as an employee, then at my first (shared) company and now as an independent)
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I was having a conversation with Marc yesterday, and he mentioned the false dichotomy between life and work
In case you’re wondering what a false dichotomy is, Pascal van Cauwenberghe recently wrote an analysis of people problem or process problem? that could serve as an example of a false dichotomy.
Making the Living Software site is an instance of how I make the distinction between life and work less and less. I’m following my passions, and make a living out of it at the same time. I enjoy writing, and I enjoy photography, so I used one of my own photographs as a background for the site title and I made the black tree I got from Nynke white so it fits better with the background.
At first I was thinking about doing the site with a (rather elaborate) CMS and link in a weblog. After evaluating textpattern, I decided to try building the whole site with that – so all pages on it have trackback, ping, and comments – a lot of my work is about making feedback loops. If feedback is good, why not have it everywhere on a site? (this weblog still hasn’t, because I’m puzzling about how to keep the links to the 140+ entries working in a new blogging engine).
In the near future I hope to make the site more self-organizing by adding a tagsonomy to it – the articles all have permanent links, so the structure of the site can vary around that (in any combinations of sections, categories and tags).
There are still a few nits to pick, and many things I want to add, but with a couple of pieces on the background of my company and me being happy enough with the layout, I am good to go, as this site is the simplest thing that could possibly work – at least I’m getting the first value – it’s making it more obvious that I’m independent, and the name of my company is Living Software 
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