About
Hello, World!
My name is Steve, and I’m trying to learn, experience, and share as much as I can during my short stint on this beautiful, beautiful planet. This is my website, a blog where I share my experiences traveling or hanging out wherever it is that I live.
Right now, I’m based in Washington State, USA. When I’m not working, I’m hiking, taking pictures, listening to/making music, enjoying time with friends, reading, and bouncing around to other places. All of these are represented to some degree on this site.
Travel
Outside of the United States, I’ve spent most of my time abroad in Turkey, a country whose people and culture have left an indelible mark on my soul. The runners up would be Canada and Germany. You can see a map of all the places I’ve written about here.
Disclaimers
All content on this website, unless otherwise noted, is copyright Where-Is-Steve, with all rights reserved. This includes all images and text.
Names and details may be changed, omitted, or invented at my discretion for reasons of respect and privacy. In general, if I am writing about another person, assume the encounter has been fictionalized, intentionally and/or via memory lapses.
All writing is my own, unless otherwise noted, and is written only on behalf of myself. It does not reflect the views of any employers, benefactors, or institutions, past, present or future. Writing may contain inaccuracies, and reflects the biases and perspective of the author. The author’s perspective is also subject to change.
Geographic data, such as maps, is not intended to be relied upon for any serious purpose. All map data on this website is potentially inaccurate, and is not validated or corrected beyond a cursory glance. Rather, it is there only as an entertaining illustration.
This is my anti-social media. It’s written first and foremost for myself, and secondly for friends and family. Thirdly, for anyone that comes across it. I use no cookies and no analytics, and deliberately seek as little metrics-based feedback as possible. I don’t want to know how many “likes” a post gets. 😉
Technical Attribution
- This site is built using the static site generator Zola. It’s pretty fab.
- Its layout was forked from Joe Clay’s Seventeen Cups of Coffee (github repo), and then subsequently messed with a bunch. This was a great starting point for me to see some responsive web design in action, and I’m grateful to Joe for making the source publicly available.
- My domain provider is PorkBun, who have been excellent so far.
- My webhost, at least on the HTML side, is Netlify, which automatically rebuilds and updates my site whenever I push to the production branch of the github repository that contains my source.
- Images are hosted separately, through Azure Blob Storage. This helps keep the website repo smaller and more portable. It only takes up a few megabytes, whereas… there are a lot of large images strewn throughout these blog posts. 😉
- Email subscription uses a combination of Azure Functions and Socketlabs, glued together via a custom library. There are some bugs I need to iron out.
- Maps are rendered via the open source Javascript library Open Layers. It’s pretty fantastic.
- I’m using slick for image carousels (the ones with arrows that fade between pics.)
- I’m using sort-table for dynamically sortable HTML tables.
Web development can be messy, and it is not my forte. Everything else is my own trial, error, and patchy patching.