OK, this is my minimalist version of the site I've been saying I should build. It isn’t elegant, but it’s a start.
And, besides, it gives me a place to put all the cool stuff folks have been asking about over the years — stuff I share freely with others to help make the Web more accessible to everyone.
More to come. And, when it rises to the level of greatest concern, I’ll make this a more elegant Web page. Cobbler’s children and shoes, you know.
Oh, who am I? More on that later, maybe, but a quick version is:
I’m proud to be a public servant — yes, that means “government worker” — because I realize that our government builds value into our communities.
I work in Web development, focusing on making sure that the content I help develop is useful, usable, and accessible. To that end, I have participated as an invited expert with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative — and will probably do so again, when I have the bandwidth to accept that invitation.
Because I see the wisdom in the Native American concept that we have borrowed this world from those not yet born, I am passionate about keeping it in good shape for them:
Lately, I’ve been exercising that passion by participating as a citizen scientist for TexasInvasives.org.
Some time ago, I was the third president of TreeFolks, the Austin-grown society that organizes volunteers to plant and care for trees in public spaces. The unique aspect of TreeFolks is that we teach our volunteers to plant trees the best way to plant trees before we set them loose to do the job.
At about the same time, I was secretary of Austin ReLeaf, an organization with the overly ambitious goal of planting 1 million trees by the year 2000 (they started in about 1990). I mention this because Austin ReLeaf created the first of what is now the Tree Growing Guide for Central Texas. (Check it out, along with the other valuable resources TreeFolks offers.) I'm proud of my participation in revising that guide, because I:
Rewrote the planting instructions to the version still used today. Perhaps there have been minor changes to the instructions I wrote, but, because our guide was copied across the country, my work inspired a major change in the instructions you'll see on tags attached to trees you buy in nurseries. (I really should blog about this.)
Removed the Arizona ash, a fast-growing, fast-dying tree that was way overplanted and is ill suited to Austin and the Hill Country. (I wish that I had persisted in getting the invasive monster, Chinese pistache, removed — I had feared it would be invasive, and it is poised to become worse than the chinaberry in that regard.) (Gee, another blog topic waiting to happen.)
I consider myself to be a progressive Christian.
My dog says that’s enough for you to know before our walk. In the meantime, to learn more about me, you might: