# Purpose and overview of this site I'm happy that you found this site. You can think of this page as the *starting page*. **The purpose of this site is to serve as my professional portfolio** and is an on-going project. This site is presented in the following sections: 1. **Welcome** - My high-level overview, my professional background, and how to contact me 2. **This site** - Why I built this site, how I'm approaching it, genAI partnership, and a record of development. 3. **Blueprint** - Somethings that I'm learning about and other things that guide my approach. 4. **Professional** - A portfolio that highlights some of my accomplishments individually and in teams. 5. **Teaching** - Highlights my professional roots in education, learning, and performance. 6. **Areas of Interest** - Some areas of particular interest that I'm digging into. ## Some background This is my 5th website since 2014. Each of my websites has been a portfolio with a focus on communicating various accomplishments. As I've grown in my career however, this purpose needs to expand. I have an interest in highlighting some of the learning design work I have done, as well as some of the rich leadership experience I have had in system design, learning ecosystems, and digital technology. With this website, I hope to communicate: 1. Things that I'm finding interesting and/or learning about; 2. Research interests that I am exploring and/or hope to be able to do professionally; 3. Perspectives and highlights from my mixed professional background; and 4. Experience and ideas for a future when I return to the classroom years down the road. ## How this project is built and organized This website is built with [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) and shared on the web with [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish). I've used this app since well before v1.0, but primarily for capturing and organizing notes. This is my first attempt at using this app for both study notes and web publishing. (These are two separate vaults.) Prior to this, I used SquareSpace to build my websites. I really love SquareSpace, but there were 2 reasons that made me decide to go with Obsidian. 1. **SquareSpace is expensive at around $200 per year with an additional fee for the domain after the first year.** SquareSpace templates are *beautiful* and allow you to make really appealing websites. In the past, I have received many positive remarks because of this. But since I first used it, the service has moved to heavily emphasize visual content and a place for users to sell goods and services. This is not what I need. 2. **Obsidian focuses on writing, and customizing the content.** I really want to just communicate my content to you in a simple way. What is more, I want to be able to adjust the CSS for the site as I like. I'm not a (master) web developer, but it's a bit fun to play with HTML and CSS. With SquareSpace, my text usually conflicted with the template and so I was hamstrung. Pages in Obsidian are more or less a collection of interconnected notes. There is something called [Graph View](https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/graph) that allows the user to visually see how notes are interconnected. (I've turned this off for this site.) You'll be able to move around this site with the left navigation, embedded links, and links at the bottom of pages. ### Site development Please see this page on [[site development]] for an explanation of how I approached building this site. Getting started with Obsidian Publish required a bit more work than with other services, so I thought I'd provide my roadmap for others to potentially use to get themselves started.