My Origin
And where I’m going. Also, my daughter Sydney loves going on river hikes with me.
The Beginning
Way before high school, when I was 2 or 3 years old, I remember sitting on my father’s lap watching him write software. He was a programmer for Massey Ferguson (now part of Agco Allis) and was able to work from home. When he was done working, I’d get to play Reader Rabbit, and it was awesome. Watching dad write software is when I really became interested in computers and general tech stuff.
I've been building websites since I was about 14 years old, a sophomore in high school. I've been blogging for a long time, too. I wrote my own CMS using PHP and hosted it on an old HP VectraXW dual processor workstation. My mom was nice enough to get another phone line to our house so my modem could be connected all the time.
I went to Collins-Maxwell High School, my graduating class had a grand total of 28 people. The entire school district had maybe 250 kids, so it was a small, intimate place.
It’s because of this environment that I was able to start exploring my interests more than I would have been able to at a larger high school. I had pretty good grades, and had good relationships with all of my teachers.
In high school, I would spend a lot of time in the computer lab “back room”. This back room was reserved for a select few people who were interested in hardware or software. There were days I’d spend nearly all day in there. I remember compiling Gnome Desktop on a Slackware 7 system, I loved it.
The Not So Distant Past and Present
Slackware was my first exposure to a unix like operating system. I’ve used various Linux distributions ever since. My current distribution of choice is Xubuntu, or Debian running XFCE.
All of these experiences have kind of meshed together and made me who I am today. I am an extremely loyal person, to friends, family, and employers. I’ve been building websites with various technologies for most of my working career, and was IT Director at The Ames Tribune newspaper in Ames, Iowa.That was a crazy, but fun ride.
I’m currently building websites for clients at Visionary Services in Des Moines. I really, truly love going to work every day. It’s the most awesome work environment I’ve ever been in. Stocked refrigerator, stocked cabinets with all kinds of healthy snacks, and freedom to work anytime between 7AM and 6PM. I love not having to be at work at a specific time, especially now that I commute 30 miles one way.
Before I started at Visionary, I had been preparing a SaaS startup to provide beautiful, elegant server monitoring and control pages for developers like myself. I put it on hold for a while, because I was busy writing WordPress Multisite Administration for Packt Publishing. It was published at the end of August 2013. You should buy it if you’re interested in building a blog network similar to WordPress.com or Tumblr.
After the book was wrapped up, I was able to start putting some more work into the startup. While I was writing the book, I came up with the name for my startup, VPSstat.us (pronounced “VPS Status”). VPSstat.us is nearly ready to be unleashed on the world. If you’re interested, you can keep up-to-date with it at the VPSstat.us Blog.VPSStat.us is setup in such a way that I can run the entire thing by myself. I’ll only need to put about an hour a week into keeping it running, it’s highly automated. I’m doing it mostly for fun and a possible passive income stream. I hope it succeeds, but won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t. Bigger fish always come along.
The Future
As far as passive income goes, I’m going to be writing more books. I always loved writing essay’s in high school, and my college prep English teacher always told me I’d write a book someday.
I have a few ideas for other books that I have presented to Packt Publishing. They’re currently doing market research to see what the demand for those books would be like. I’ve thought about doing the whole self publishing thing, and that’s actually looking more and more attractive, although it was a very pleasant experience working with the kind folks at Packt.
Starting in 2014, I am going to attempt to publish two books per year, for the next 5 years. I really do enjoy writing, and writing provides a relatively nice passive income. The only problem with writing technical books is that they quickly become out of date.
I’ve also slowly become less involved in the WordPress community, although I do still contribute themes and plugins. I’ve found Anchor CMS taking up some more of my time, I’ve used it for a number of small sites recently. In fact, the VPSstat.us Blog is running on Anchor CMS with a custom theme based on Zurb Foundation.
If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can shoot me an email using the contact form at longren.org or hit me up on Twitter, @tlongren, or on Google+.
