Who Is This Guy?

My name is Andrew, and I am a husband, father, Catholic Libertarian reader, a gen-x thrift-shop philosopher, a non-wartime Army veteran, a 3D printing enthusiast, a web developer. I wrote a book once. And I might do it again.

I was a child of the 1970's and a teenager of the 1980's and a lost and wayward young man of the early 90's.

In 1997 I married my amazing wife and became a husband. Marriage, as difficult as it can be on occasion, was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. In hindsight, it's obvious that God put events into motion that brought the two of us together.

My wedding vows were the first thing I ever truly took seriously. Fitting, as they were my first sacrament. Marriage has also helped me to think less about myself and my selfish whims, although I am still a selfish and sinful man.

In the decades that we've been married, my wife and I have adopted a son and our family has moved around the country for work quite a bit. That journey has taken us to some of America's biggest cities. For the past ten years, however, we've been back in our native Midwest living in a small farm town.

Several years ago, I finally underwent more sacraments when I became baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church, received my first Holy Communion, and experienced Reconciliation. I love the Catholic Church despite the inescapable problems inherent in any institution involving humans.

I am currently interested in a bunch of things, and the list changes all the time so I won't list them here.

What Is This Website?

This is a throwback to a good old fashioned 1990's "blog". I'm here to explore my thoughts on different things, or share ideas and things that I find interesting. 

The blog is called "Fidelis-Explorator", which is Latin for Faithful Explorer because that's what I try to be. Faithful to Jesus Christ, and an Explorer of Christian faith, history, and philosophy and how all of those things relate to and impact our culture.

If you want to read something I've written here, that's great! You might agree with me on some things and probably will disagree with me on most things. I just hope one thing I've written makes one person think differently about something.

You can comment on posts for the first week after they're written. Just be cool about it.

When Will You Post New Stuff?

There's no way to know how often I'll post here. It could be twice daily and it could be monthly. When the urge to share something I'm thinking about strikes me, I'll post it.

Why Are You Doing This?

Sometimes I read things, or hear things, that send my mind off down a path of exploration. And sometimes I'm just dumb enough to fool myself into thinking I've come up with something interesting. I know that's really not the case, but maybe the nonsense I've come up with will be the catalyst that helps another person think about something interesting. And I think it's worth looking foolish most of the time for even the possibility that one thing I write will be a tiny little diamond for someone else to find. So I'm doing it.

What Platform Are You Using?

This website runs on my own flat-file content management system (CMS). I built it from the ground up over the course of about a year. I named it "JaspyCMS" after the first pet that my wife and I had, many years ago, a cat named "Jasper". He was the inspiration for my logo as well. No, he did not wear glasses.

I built my first website back in 1996 with plain old html on a platform called "Tripod". We didn't even have stylesheets back then, so each page was it's own entity and it was a pain to do anything. Even then, I dreamed of a 'system' for creating and managing a website. I just didn't know anything about coding or about how to even create a proper website.

Then I got married and didn't think any more about it for a handful of years. Then I found WordPress and it was the system I'd dreamed of. I went to a few WordCamps and met Matt Mullenweg, the guy who created WordPress. He is a fantastically nice guy, by the way. And I used WordPress for a long time and have made a lot of money building WordPress websites for people because it was a great system.

But WordPress got weird, and I fell out of love with their user interface. What was once simple and easy to use became a bloated mess. I've continued to use it for my client projects, but I once again felt the itch to build my own thing. So I did.

What you see on the front end looks pretty simple. It was designed that way. The real work went into making a system custom built to be simple, lightweight and easy to use. Unsurprisingly, it's reminiscent of classic WordPress, just maybe a big more sleek, hopefully faster, and easy to set up. Some day I might share it.

Thanks for visiting my site.

God Bless You.