So it’s a new year and time to make a new start on ye olde blog site. I last refreshed my design and tools around 2006. So why change now? Well I was influenced by Scott Lowe’s migration post. A lot of what he had to say resonated with me. Back in July I changed my job role from a hands-on, live-down-in-the-weeds technologist running a fairly large complex portion of a customer environment to a consultancy role advising a variety of customers. I’m not entirely hands-off but I’m a lot less hands-on than I was before. And I learn by doing and by documenting what it is I’m doing. So when Scott Lowe talks about “walking the walk” and being familiar with developer processes, that’s really where I came from as well. So partly this is meant to keep me both rooted and current. And once I got to thinking about doing it, then I started reading up on the various tools and really thinking about how I’d make the change. That was a sure sign that I needed to stop thinking and start doing.
I had also stopped writing, at least publically. I actually did a lot of writing inside my former employer using TWiki . So using a markup language, like MarkDown, fits my natural workflow. It’s easy to use tmux or screen and simple text editors to capture what’s happening and doc it up as you go. So I wrote a lot in the previous job and probably could have sanitized and published some posts but really never did. One reason is that I was just too busy hanging on the end of an on-call rotation.
The other reason I’d come to realize was the tool. Wordpress is a nice, rich blogging platform. It’s really a full-fledged Content management System. But for me, it’s almost too rich. I prefer simplicity and writing in markup in a text editor with a sprinkling of syntax highlighting makes sense to me. Word processors and WYSIWYG in-browser editors just get in my way. I got tired of worrying about PHP vulnerabilities and protecting a MySQL database and the constant update cycle as well. So while Wordpress may be an easy to use platform in a lot of ways, it lacks simplicity.
I did think about converting the old site over but ultimately decided to start with a fresh slate and follow my prior approach of keeping the old site in place, largely as is. Old links remain pretty much where they were. I did follow this method to first convert my wordpress site to a static html representation. Then I can just write on my laptop, build the side with jekyll and use rsync to publish. I haven’t yet added a hook to automate the rsync publishing with git push origin master but that will likely come shortly.
So with this presumably lower friction, more natural platform it’s up to me to start putting more content up. So I’ll link to things I’m reading about, watching, and listening to. I’ll also hopefully be able to document some interesting experiences with customers and their challenges.