The regular readers of this blog (judging by the comments & stats) are either from the architectural community, are looking for an architect or generally just like architecture. Obviously therefore the majority of the blog posts are of an architectural nature; occasionally the odd cycling analogy creeps in but by and large the posts are architectural or planning related.

The blogging engine that runs what you are reading is WordPress.com (the more or less free and open-source platform that (in my opinion) is one of the most elegant and powerful website tools available. Now a while back I also set up a personal blog (principally to see if I could handle the hosting and set-up); it was also a little testing ground to learn new WordPress bits and bobs (admittedly just for the fun of it!) – the ‘self-hosted’ engine is more or less the same as the .com but allows you to go under the hood and tinker.

The personal website therefore is at MarkStephens.net (you can also click on the image below):

Now if you’re already following me on Instagram you’ll see the same photos; occasionally you’ll see the odd nugget of written wisdom but mostly the website is a holding ground of photographs of Mayo, my family and my growing bike collection!

How do I find time to run two blogs? Well I don’t really; the blog you’re reading now is my main outlet and MarkStephens.net takes the photographs from Instagram and auto-posts them to the website. How does it do this? WordPress can auto-post via email but is tricky to do with a gmail address; therefore Instagram allows you to post to a variety of websites such as Posterous and my FaceBook page and it is the Posterous Space that then allows the auto-posting to WordPress.