Garret Vreeland calls his website dangerousmeta after a warning about dangerous meta characters he found funny but if I would pick any description of him after reading his site for the last three years, many emails and a few phone conversations it would be genuinely humble and gentlemanly. My grandma might have called him a true mensch, unlike a mutual acquaintance of ours who only thinks he’s one.
Many people of good will have connected across the internet as I have with Garret, helping out, answering questions, enjoying honest conversation. But I’ve found few who will go to the same lengths and a simple example came along just last week. He went to school at Princeton and then lived for awhile nearby, which is close to where my folks live now, and TS1 and I were hoping to get in a little sightseeing. I shot him off an email and in return I got something that would barely be out of place in a travel guide!
For the last few years he’s made a living as a web site developer, an independent contractor/consultant, though you’d hardly know it from his own site as he makes no mention and gives no links to customer sites. Perhaps you recall Behind the Curtain, one of the first big global community web projects, which Garret conceived and implemented. Mention of that effort is the only self-advertisement you’ll find on dangerousmeta!
And the ease with which he moves through technology is pretty impressive, just from what you can see by observing the site over time. In fact, he started having problems with MovableType early in the week and by this afternoon he completely migrated to WordPress, a server-based blogging system written in PHP. With a completely new, very attractive design as well. Over the last few years, the site has changed underlying tech several times: first the free Userland editthispage.com system, then their Manila server, a Zope/Python application Garret wrote himself (though I don’t recall him ever offering the software for others to use), then MT and now WordPress. Perhaps now that an A-Lister is using it, people will start thinking of WordPress as cool and worthy of reference as WP?
So where am I going with all this? I guess I was spurred by the tech migration to comment in some manner and let the post get out of hand. Then I wanted to verbalize my impression of the man, who probably would have been a Latin scholar or modern agronomist if he’d been born in 1859 instead of 1959. Add a bit of gratitude for his help, advice and insight, not to mention the traffic he’s linked my way. Plus some hot fudge and whip cream, because those go good on a Friday night dessert. Cheers dude!
BillSaysThis 