My name is Steve Ivy, though you may see me around as sivy, monkinetic, or even occasionally wallrazer. I write at monkinetic.com.

I work for myself, and you can find me at Wallrazer. This is my personal site, which over the 14 years it’s been running, has run on UserLand’s News Suite, Conversant, Wordpress, TypePad, and (this version) Octopress.

In my spare time I’m your basic nerd. You can follow me on Twitter if you like. I also co-founded the DiSo Project with Chris Messina, and spent many night hours hacking microformats, OpenID, and XMPP into Wordpress, as well as running the DiSo website, wiki, and Google Code site.

These days I lurk on the Federated Social Web list and the #ostatus IRC channel, as they’ve sort of taken on the mantle that DiSo represented.

I also build a LOT of SciFi-themed LEGO.

Your can find me on:

• Twitter (steveivy)
• AIM (monkinetic)
• GTalk (steveivy@gmail.com)
• monkinetic or sivy on irc.freenode.net

On The Significance of HyperCard

Discovering HyperCard in a closet during a desktop publishing course changed my entire worldview.

Seven Dream Jeopardy Categories

• Pre-2000 R.E.M.
• Blogging
• Playing with LEGO as a Grown-Up
• The Open Web
• The Joy and Trials of Adoption
• Facebook Ambivalence
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail

(Download my contact information)

This was my first about page:

My name is Steve Ivy, and I run redmonk.net. I’m a web architect by trade, for Compass. My unofficial title is web architect, designer, and xml evangelist.

Work Stuff:

I discovered the web back in 1994, when Mosaic was really cool. The office I worked in as a graphic design production assistant was next door to the local ISP. I convinced the owner to get an account. To grind out a cliché: The rest was history. [I should clarify: I was not at all involved in the development of Ethicom’s site. Pity- it’s a nice site. ;–)]

In 1996 I found myself in Germany working for a great design studio, ArtLab Europe. I knew that the web thing was going to be big (honest!) and again convinced my boss (Thanks Joseph!) to let me do some investigating. Soon I was neck deep in FreeBSD, BBEdit, Perl, and the Bare Bones Guide To HTML. We quickly found ourselves with a rock solid FreeBSD-based web server internally, and we transformed ArtLab into a graphic design and webdesign studio.

I also discovered Frontier in 1996. I’ve been spoiled for web development ever since. If you are a web developer, and don’t know what Frontier is, check it out here.

In 1998 I stumbled onto XML; totally by accident, even before there was an XML.com. ArtLab was working with a client who was transforming XML-stored content into PageMaker-compatible markup and delivering it, simultaneously rendering a website. The penny dropped, and it’s been a crusade of mine ever since, much to the annoyance of several groups of coworkers to date. Well, no one’s perfect.

Other Stuff:

I am a rabid, ok, maybe not rabid, but really really (really) fan of R.E.M. I narrowly missed seeing them in Hamburg, Germany when Bill Berry had something pop in his noggin, and darn it, they decided to skip some shows. Imagine that.

Should we talk about the weather?

Lego Plus

So what do you do on an evening that you’re bored and don’t know what to do? Why, build a Mac Plus out of LEGO, of course!

Why redmonk.ret?

As a sometime freelance web developer, I’ve needed an online home for a while. More than that, I want a venue for communication which is entirely mine. redmonk.net is that place.

Actually, this was my first about page:

Ok, apparently I was wrong, and this ArtLab page was my first about page. Wow, who’s the creepy bald guy?