New year, new home

Page, that is. This must be the third redesign of my website in the past year. You heard right, THIRD. “But this is the one,” I always say. False. I keep scrapping and rebuilding this darn site. It’s not that I thought the old versions were bad, they just could be better. Hence, this latest redesign: stronger, better, faster.

Is that a blog I see?

Yes, it is, thanks for noticing!

Aside from my insatiable appetite for changing my home page, the main purpose of this latest iteration was to launch not just a splash page but also a blog. I’ve been wanting to blog about more than memes and cat gifs (I less than three you, Tumblr), specifically about my latest findings, projects, hacks, and other snippets I feel like sharing. Not only do I push content out into the Web, I also benefit by gaining a better understanding of what I write about, more practice expressing ideas clearly and concisely, and a neat log of milestones in my development career.

Dr. Jekyll

I had a tough time choosing which blogging platform to host this site on. It eventually boiled down to Tumblr and Jekyll. The appeal of Tumblr came from the fact that I was already always on it, which I felt would have motivated me to blog more. It also has a pretty simple editing and publishing platform, not to mention easy theme rolling.

I started developing the new site on Tumblr for some time, then stumbled across Jekyll. After some contemplating, Jekyll seemed to be the better solution for the following reasons:

• I get to own, manage, and completely customize my posts, data, etc.
• Jekyll builds static pages, which I can serve up really quickly.
• Markdown is awesomely simple!
• I can roll my own publishing and deployment methods.

The last point has turned out to be the coolest. Working at Linode for the past few months, I’ve grown to love the command line. A lot. It’s oddly exhilarating to be able to draft a new page with a rake new:post and publish it with a simple rake publish && rsync.

I’m looking forward to writing more and building out this site’s content (as it’s pretty empty right now). As for the design, I think it’s here to stay, at least for a little while. I can’t promise I won’t be making a few tweaks here and there.

P.S. You can view the source on GitHub! Feel free to do what you want with it. I’d appreciate if you didn’t copy it exactly though.