What I hope to do

I recently created this Nesta blog as a test of something I hope to use to help me write my dissertation at the University of Delaware.

I study transportation policy, particularly those governing public authorities. I'm focusing my dissertation--and it's still in its early, proposal stages--on these transportation authorities increasing forays into economic development activities.

I plan on writing much of the dissertation in plain text using Markdown. I figure I can push out my writing as blog posts--a writing forum that is informal enough to forgive the urgency and earnestness of early-draft grad work yet public enough to prod me towards rigor and regularity. That's where this site comes in: it's a Nesta-powered blog that I push to the Heroku hosting environment. I write my posts in a text editor, save each one to a folder here on my laptop, and type a few words in the command line. Poof. The posts go to the website. And they're on my computer. And they're on the website. I can also write pages the same way. Technically, though, pages and posts are the same. It's just that I title them differently--posts get a date, pages get none.

It's a good system if one wants to have a closer connection with one's writing and have more control over one's public feed. Really, I just hope that this will be one of those research aids that enables me to wake up one day and have a sizeable stack of serviceable ideas from which to assemble a final product.