I managed to dig up the old blog. It’s a little bit sad how old these old posts all are. At one point, I thought I wanted to be a programmer’s programmer. I wanted to write a book. Something like “Hibernate in Action.” I followed my former colleague, Chris Brogan, an emerging social media superstar of the RSS-fueled blogosphere. I created posts with lots of images and encouraged engagement in the comments.
But that’s not what this is about anymore.
I like to write. For me. I just enjoy it. And every time I had inspiration, I thought about blogging about it. But the problem was that my blog was in Octopress. The premise of Octopress was great, it simplified pushing posts to your github pages site! And you could even write your posts in good ol’ Markdown. It’d generate a static site for you!
But I let a lot of time pass between posts. And every time I went to write my thoughts down - my rvm app wasn’t working right. Or bundler was out of date. Or the bundler I was running wasn’t shimmed correctly and running against a ruby installation that didn’t match. And if I reinstall ruby from scratch, how many gems won’t build on this laptop? And which rake command publishes? Which rake command creates an empty post? And do I still need to push to github, or does it do that for me?
So I ditched Octopress. This thing? It’s shell scripts that I wrote and understand, along with pandoc, a tool that follows the Unix philosophy of do one thing and do it well.
I hope this breaks down one more barrier to writing more. I hope that owning my words (rather than letting someone like Twitter or Facebook or Medium or whomever own them) will make a difference. I hope that eventually I can ditch Github pages so that I can own my words even more, on my own server. But for now, this is great. I have a Markdown editor, I have a couple of shell scripts, and I can publish whatever is on my mind.
Let’s see if it sticks. I haven’t written anything here in over two years. Maybe it’ll sputter out again.
