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About Chuq

Chuq Von Rospach first joined the internet about 1980, long before most of you were probably born and definitely before most of you had any idea the internet existed. He spent almost 18 years working for Apple Computer, and is now the Developer Community Manager for Palm.

Happily married for over 20 years to Laurie Sefton, proud papa of a blended family consisting of Tatiana (an umbrella cockatoo) and Archie (our rescued feral cat) and Manon (our cat adopted from Humane Society Silicon Valley). It is never boring in our house.

Chuq is an avid (if still learning) birdwatcher and a serious photographer, especially of birds and nature work.

Chuq is a strong supporter of Santa Clara Valley Audubon, Habitat for Humanity, and The Nature Conservancy.

Chuq is a serious hockey fan, and he and Laurie are season ticket holders with the San Jose Sharks, and have been since the first season of the team’s existance. Earlier in his life, despite growing up in Southern California, he became a hockey fan and followed the Los Angeles Kings, long before Wayne Gretzky left Edmonton and made being a Kings fan trendy. Chuq and Laurie were the team webmasters for the IHL’s  San Francisco Spiders their one year of existance at the Cow Palace (our motto: It’s a pit, but it’s OUR pit). He still owns and occasionally wears his sfspiders.com jersey proudly. Well, okay, he still wears it once in a while. He still believes you can’t call yourself a real hockey fan unless you’ve watched hockey in a building without an upper deck and thinks the best hockey game he ever watched was the Victoria Salsa playing the Cowichan Valley Capitals in the old Victoria arena (since torn down and replaced by a modern building, of course). He also believes that the best thing to ever happen to Victoria hockey was when the Spiders died before relocating up there and screwing up minor league hockey in a second city.

Chuq has also been known to follow other sports; Chuq and Laurie were season ticket holders for the San Jose Giants (A level) for years, and Laurie still attends spring training regularly (she is — gasp — a Mariners fan). Chuq is now a lapsed baseball fan who also occasionally follows curling, CFL football and the Tour de France, plus has a bad tendency towards “what’s on TV today?” sports consumption.

Contacting Chuq

You can email me at me@chuqui.com. With any luck, I’ll answer. I have a goal to answer things within 48 hours and keep my inbox close to zero. I also have a great challenge actually succeeding at this.

Chuq’s Writing and Other Stuff

I am currently active on the following sites. Feel free to friend/follow/contact/say-hi on them and let me know you’re a reader of my blog:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Linkedin

Why Chuq is writing this in the third period

Well, because I felt like it.

About this Site

Welcome to the latest version of “my life on the internet”. I’ve been doing “blogging”, whatever that is, since 2001, originally using Movable Type (with a blog known as Teal Sunglasses), later moving to Typepad, and now moving back to running my own show and controlling my own destiny using WordPress here on chuqui.com.

Why make the change? The old Typepad sites were looking pretty dated and, well, generic, which at the time was by design. One reason is that now that I’m doing web work as part of my job, I wanted a site that looked like I actually have my act together in the web development universe; the Typepad sites didn’t, in my mind, look attractive or really make my writing attractive from a design standpoint, and since photography is an increasingly important aspect of my life and blogging (and with any luck, future income), it was critical that my blogs show off my photography well.

Additionally, at the time I made the move to Typepad, there was a common thought that the “future is RSS” and that blog design really didn’t matter, because blogs were just convenient holding points for the content to be fed to readers. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve moved beyond that view now, and we’ve come back to realizing that design matters, and a good design matters.

Once I decided it was time to “open up the hood” and rebuild my online publishing universe, it was easy to make the decision to rethink the platform; I like Typepad and it has many advantages, but I wanted a chance to get into the guts of another platform besides Movable Type and Drupal, and I was working on a side project with a friend on Wordpress and liked it, so I decided now was a good time to “move home” back to my own server and domain here on chuqui.com, and build something tied closely to my long-term view of where I want to take my online publishing.

I originally planned on writing a fully custom setup in Python and Django, but looking at my various committments and the time I estimated it’d take me to fully come up to speed with the language and do something I was happy with, the date I came up with for that was “months from now”, and that wasn’t really acceptable. So I decided to spend a few weeks building things in Wordpress, and then continue to extend and customize over time fromt his new, non-sucky baseline. Overall, I think that was a good decision, and I have plenty of plans to keep me plenty busy over time, but I don’t feel pressured to focus on the geeking right now, and instead, can focus on the content, which is my real interest right now.

I also decided, instead of building a theme for the blog from scratch, I went looking for a theme that I could start with and customize and/or replace over time as I decided to extend functionality here. After looking at way too many themes (some good, many okay, some really, really sucky), I based this site on Brian Gardner’s Revolution2 Code Blue. Why? One, I really like the theme, it’s clean, it’s open, it doesn’t have that “20% grey on black” text that seems so trendy but it unreadable by us old pharts and I thought it’d adapt well to use with photography — but it’s not a photoblog, because I found most of the photoblog designs didn’t really look good if you didn’t put a photograph in every posting, and I wanted something that worked as both a regular blog and a photo blog; I didn’t want to create/support multiple blogs any more.

Beyond that, it’s a GPLed theme, but at the same time, Brian has a support system that will allow me to throw him some money down the road after the site launches and everything settles down. I decided to go that route because (a) I don’t have to worry about violating licensing as I modify and change this theme down the road, and (b) I didn’t need to pay for the theme before seeing if I could adapt it to what I wanted it to be; at the same time, I do have a way to toss him some money, because a lot of good work has gone into the design and he deserves it (as well as this plug).

The first thing I did was change the theme to a two-column format to make more room for the photos, and widen the one column that was left to fit my preferences. I gives me a nice, open format with nice white space and flexibility to show off photography at various sizes, but the text area isn’t too wide to affect readability if I don’t use imagery in a posting. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it, and the guts of this base theme are quite well-designed and implemented. A number of the themes I looked into weren’t quite that pretty under the hood, even in (well, especially in) the “Premium Theme” market. Overall, I’m quite happy with the choice.

Guest Blogging

Right now, we’re not accepting guest bloggers or reviewers. Down the road, we probably will. When that happens, we’ll publish a process for people interested in contributing to this site to submit material. Right now, I want to make sure my own act is together before being responsible for your act, too.