As far as the internet knows, there are exactly 3 people on the globe named Dino Chiesa. One is a guy who lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is into real-estate.  Another is a retired Italian race driver, who now owns a karting team.  I’m not either of those. I’m the third guy.

This blog is a sporadic outlet for me. I’ll write about software things, industry things, management, strategy, communications, marketing, and that sort of thing. Probably not much about Canadian real-estate or karting.

View my CV. (gets updated lazily)

About The Blog

The blog runs on WordPress, which is an open-source PHP-based blog system. For the theme, a few years back I started with smartone, and modified it a little, to make it work better for me. I cleaned up the display, removed the mural pictures. I added in some social media buttons, so you can share posts on Google+ or Facebook or Reddit or Twitter with a quick click.

That required just a little bit of PHP tweaking and some Javascript magic.

I’m no designer, so the whole blog is still pretty basic.
I also added in a few extra options in the list of subscription options shown in the upper right corner of each page; these let readers connect with me via Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn or Stackoverflow. And I added a couple of new widgets to the sidebar. One shows Google+ activity; I’ve described that last part here. Another is a skydrive hotlink plugin, which I use to allow you to directly download my CV. I made a few others as well. You can find all the plugins I’ve publicly released on wordpress.org. PHP is pretty handy, and it doesn’t deserve the disparagement it receives from some quarters. JavaScript is just as goofy as a language.

But even after all those customizations, the site didn’t look good on a mobile phone. And it was growing kind of stale for me. So I moved to the Gateway theme from rescuethemes. I lost a bit of the customization I did with the buttons and so on, but all of the plugins still work. Which is nice.

The blog is hosted on nearlyfreespeech.net. For those of you on a budget, with a low-volume blog like this, I recommend nearlyfreespeech.net. It’s NOT free, but it’s pretty cheap. Just register your domain (about $10 a year) and park it on the free service, install wordpress, and you’ve got yourself a low-cost blogging system. MySql, FTP, SSH access, and so on.  A good deal. Recommended. I originally was on 000webhost, but the service there was not very good, especially the network performance. In June 2014, I moved the WordPress blog to NFS.

In January 2016, I used LetsEncrypt to get a site certificate and deploy it to my NearlyFreeSpeech-hosted site. This was pretty easy. No extra cost.

About The Author

I figure in some ways this blog acts as my digital CV. Aside from the content and structure of the posts I’ve written over the years, you can look at the JS code to see what I did with the frontends; you can see the plugins I’ve written for WordPress; and you can find my Stackoverflow participation. What you won’t see is much of my professional work – the stuff that keeps me busy most of my work week. This blog is a spare-time endeavor. If you have any questions, let me know by contacting me with the links in the upper-right corner.