After a few months of running the new site I thought it’s time to get posting again. To start with I thought I’d explain what thinking went into deciding to rebuild it.
Origins
I started blogging back in July 2004. Originally I was using Google’s Blogger which worked well enough for a time. It was quick to setup and use.
Eventually I decided it would be better to have my blog running under my own domain. So in August 2006 I moved it onto a self hosted install of Drupal. Despite taking a small step backwards in terms of design I now owned my content and could do anything I wanted with my blog.
So after 6 years why the big change?
Unsettled
Short answer: I was unsettled. The blog was stagnating and I needed to do something. My last proper post was nearly four years ago and I had grown up from posting random observations and crazy ideas.
What I wanted to do was turn calebbrown.id.au into a place where I could stick my résumé, project links and tech blog posts - as well as post about other things going on in my life. How this was going to happen with the old blog I wasn’t quite sure.
Along with this, Drupal and PHP were no longer the technologies I wanted to work with or have my website run on.
Lightsabers and Blogs
While I was thinking and looking for a new way to run my blog over the last few years I read a blog post entitled Be a Good Jedi: Build Your Own Blog.
The author talks about how developers should build their own blogging engines like Jedis build their own Lightsabers. As a web developer that idea really resonated with me – what I write about on my blog says as much about me as the software it runs on.
So I decided that if I’m going to make my blog the place I talk web development then the software it runs on needs to demonstrate that I might have some clue about what I talk about.
And besides, none of the existing engines I could find matched the way I wanted mine to work, so making one seemed like a natural choice.
The Blog
So after about a year in the making here is the result! Something that is almost a static blog, uses the disk for data storage and is written in Python – checkout the about page if you want a little more detail.
Finally, in the next month or so, once I clean up the repo and stick in a license file and some docs I’ll open source it - so stay tuned.