After an entire year of slacking, it’s time I get this site spun back up.
I’ve moved away from running a Wordpress site. I really enjoyed the continuous integration setup I had in place for automatically publishing code file changes from BitBucket to Windows Azure. But then I stopped messing with it.
Looking back, a number of things happened personally that made it hard to keep up with this site. Instead of writing about them via a public website, I started keeping tracking of them with the excellent Momento application. Things happen in life, and it’s how we deal with them that defines us as people.
Anyway, I’ve moved this site over to GitHub Pages. I’ve been meaning to move the site since September or October, but finally got tired of paying $10 per month to host a website I really wasn’t working on. In early December, I came across a post from Phil Haack about how he had migrated to GitHub Pages, and decided to give it a shot. I even stole his theme temporarily, but have been making a number of custom changes. The template features in Jekyll make it a snap to do.
Sadly, in that same article, Phil also bemoaned the demise of SubText:
It’s with a heavy heart that I admit publicly what everyone has known for a while. Subtext is done. None of the main contributors, myself included, have made a commit in a long while.
Initially, I built my first site on Blogger. After a couple of years of that, I moved over to SubText and ran it on for quite a while. I made other half-hearted attempts to run other software, but just couldn’t find anything I liked. SubText really was the software that I spent most of my time creating content on. I’ll miss that package.
At some point I’ll get into more detail on how I have this site set up with GitHub and Jekyll. There a number of other resources out there that will help you get things running. Most of them helped, but I ran into a few snags that took me a little while to work through. I can’t help but notice some of the similarities between Jekyll and Blogger, but I definitely feel like I have a lot more power under Jekyll. This in spite of the fact that GitHub Pages doesn’t allow custom plugins to run; but the simple solution is to run Jekyll locally and then check in the published content. This is similar to how Octopress runs.
Anyway… maybe I’ll actually stick with creating content on this site for a while. I don’t care if it’s considering blogging or writing or just simply blathering on. I look forward to having an outlet to randomly throw some words up to from time to time, because sometimes I vehemently feel like I need to say something that absolutely nobody will read.