You have reached Simone Parrish.
If you look for “Simone Parrish” on most search engines, you’ll find this site. I’m a knowledge manager, product manager, poet, artist, and epicure. I have profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook, and a photo gallery on SmugMug. I don’t have a listing on IMDb, or a modeling portfolio, or a profile on MySpace. (Those are the other Simone Parrishes. If you were looking for one of them, you may wish to back quietly out of my website now.)
Why “Words | Web | Woad”
Professionally, I don’t recommend using a site name that’s different from the domain. That tends to mess with the search engine optimization (SEO). I broke my own rules when I picked the title for this site. When Google+ came along in June 2011, it asked me to choose a “personal tagline” for my profile. I chose words, because I love them and believe they should be used with care and precision; Web, because it’s the medium I work in most; and woad, because I have unusual hobbies. I like the sound of the three words together, and how much personal meaning they contain. Because Google understands that “Words | Web | Woad” is mine, my SEO is still strong.
Originally, in 2011,[1] this site was meant to be about my professional life. Eventually I started adding personal/culinary/artistic content here as well. I wanted a place to put my writing and other creative work that is within my control, from an intellectual property perspective. Intellectual property gets really messy when you start posting on shared social media sites and using Web-based services. I was also deeply put off by Facebook’s 2010 assertion that that “people of integrity” have a single identity. If I want to have a nom de plume, or a stage name, or an Iron Age Celtic identity for living history, that’s my business. (As of 2014, Facebook has softened that stance.)
If you have actually met me in real life and think I’d be willing to have lunch with you, feel free to friend me on Facebook. I use Facebook in an almost-purely social capacity. If we have interacted in a professional capacity, please find me on LinkedIn.
I didn’t care about having a personal website until Colin MacDonald started blogging about his “interview stories”.[2] His approach to job hunting and presenting a professional identity have been inspirational. In March 2011, I set this site up (with the kind assistance of Jeanne Kramer-Smyth of the also-inspiring Spellbound Blog) as a place to write about my interests, primarily the ones I apply in a professional setting.
Then, life interrupted. Ironically, part of the interruption was my pursuit of a new job. This site languished in (embarrassing) “coming soon!”-land for months. It might still be there, except that my older sister Michelle started a website in September 2011. Is she a web professional? No. Does she have strong opinions about web product development? No. She is a teacher, an artist, and an artisan—[3] a natural dyer and master weaver. Her blog is adorable. I got completely ashamed of myself. Hence, content. You’re welcome.
[1] Alert readers will note that the archive of this site dates back to 2007. However, nearly all posts and pages from before 2011 are imported from a previous blog, http://macromediocrity.blogspot.com.
[2] Punctuation and quotation marks: Periods and commas belong inside quotation marks in formal writing (unless the quotation is followed by a parenthetical expression). I know this. I used to live it. However, in HTML and other types of code I have worked in, putting punctuation inside quotation marks breaks the code. My typing now defaults to “outside the quotation marks”, because it’s easier to fix punctuation while copy editing than it is to fix broken code.
[3] I hand-coded an em-dash here before I figured out how to get the extended toolbar to show up. I think “Hand-Coding Em Dashes” says a lot about my skill set. Normally there wouldn’t be a space after the em-dash, but this hand-coded footnote thing is messing with me.