Introduction and overview
Feb 15, 2009
This is a website where I put things. Sometimes it's photos. Sometimes it's words. Some day it may be other stuff. Updates are infrequent. This site is first and foremost for myself, but if you manage to derive some sort of entertainment out of it, that's great too.
About me
My name is Mike Pierce. I'm an Australian guy living and working somewhere in Europe. I've been in Copenhagen, Denmark working as a Web Developer for the past 21/2 years, but am on my onwards to new things. I co-founded, edit and occasionally write for Polaroids of Androids, a Sydney based music website. I enjoy most of the things that people often say they enjoy when they say they enjoy something.
About the name
Monachilada means precisely nothing. It's a made up word that came out of one of those strange high school in-jokes with your friends that sounds ridiculous if you try to explain it to anybody else. It was useful in that the domain name was available when I needed it, although I did let monachilada.com lapse a few years ago and had to move here instead.
About the site
I've created a space that will allow me to express my creative ideas in a tangible form. By simplifying the site, I'm able to let it grow organically without too many preconceived notions of what it is supposed to be or become. The side effect of this is that I'm not burdened with the notion of it being unfinished. The idea is just the opposite, that it will never be finished, always growing, evolving.
I've also created the site to be a haven from the restraints of client work. While I'm happy working as a developer professionally, I also have the need to create things exactly the way I want them without creative, budget or technical limitations being imposed on me. To that end, if the site is not to your taste or doesn't render properly in your browser, then it is of no interest to me.
Syndication
To subscribe to the RSS feed of the site, you can use the following URL: http://monachilada.net/rss.
Contact information
If you'd like to get in contact with me, you can do so by email at mike@monachilada.net. I'm also on Twitter at twitter.com/monachilada. I've also started posting any videos I do on vimeo.
Technical information
This site was built using PHP, more specifically with the CakePHP framework. The core is based around assets (images and media uploads) and items (posts like the one you're reading now). There is no javascript used in the core, however if their was it would be based on the jQuery library.
I code all the items by hand, using simple HTML markup, some of which plug into a small but ever growing library of CSS styles to give things the desired appearance. I work on a Apple MacBook at home, so most of the items are created there. The site is made to render in standards compliant browsers such as Apple Safari or Mozilla Firefox, and I have paid no heed to how it renders in any version of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
As time goes on I plan to install experiments into the site using the plugin architecture available in CakePHP. These could be anything, but will mostly revolve around the application of data to create interesting things. These will live outside the core of the site, both phsically and stylistically, but be referenced from within.