First post!

Well, I just got the blog up and running and need to write my first post. Not sure what to say… It has been 7 years since I started a blog!

Let’s see… I am using Jekyll and Git to manage this site, which is a lot nicer than the collection of static HTML files that it used to be. I went back and forth about whether or not Jekyll was right for me given that it doesn’t support tags but ultimately decided that until I can’t live without them it should suffice just fine. I definitely like that I am writing my posts in Vim and upload them by pushing changes to a Git repository.

I think that it is going to take me a little while to find my voice for this blog. I am feeling very fish-out-of-water at the moment. What do I plan to talk about here?

Well, first I have a lot of thoughts and ideas about websites, web development and programming and plan to do my best to share those as they come to me. However, I think it will take quite a bit more effort to write those sort of posts so I don’t know how often they will happen. I would like to put a decent amount of thought into the stuff I write here.

But I do plan to blog shorter entries about any problems I come across in my day to day programming and the solutions that I find for them. For example, once I iron out my implementation I will post about how I had to write my own custom tag (for the Liquid templating language) to get the front page of this site to look how I want it to. These posts will be more objective and to the point, I imagine.

One last thing I plan on doing is similar to what these guys do. They post once every one or two days with a collection of interesting links they have found online (examples here or here). I thought about having two kinds of content on this site (blog posts and links) but then decided that I really liked this idea. It lets me talk as much or as little about the sites I link to, and I don’t have to worry about ‘spamming’ people’s feed readers.

The one downside to grouping interesting links like this is that if you are reading in a feed reader and you do find a link you are curious about you can’t just flag that particular link, you have to flag the whole post. I find that sometimes I will go back to a post full of links and not remember which one I was saving for later. Overall, though, I think this is a small trade-off.

One last thing, there is no commenting yet. Because I am using Jekyll, all files on the site are static HTML files, so commenting isn’t supported and isn’t going to be any time soon. But what I am going to do is use the Disqus (pronounced ‘Discuss’ in case you were curious) commenting system because everything gets loaded via Javascript. I am not crazy about Disqus, mostly because I don’t trust them (I think this idea could be implemented in a more open way that doesn’t bind you to a third party), but for the sake of convenience until I find something I like more or make myself it will do.