Welcome! It has been a while since I’ve last blogged on either of my past two blogs (A Wordpress blog I kept in high school and a Drupal blog I posted to in college). I’ve missed having a place to dump my long-form thoughts where my friends (or not friends) can opt-in to getting them.
Technology
Both my previous blogs went unmaintained and succumbed to common security exploits that could’ve easily been prevented. In particular, my Wordpress installation was used as an entry point to send spam, and my Drupal blog (The Daily Cow) didn’t fare much better.
That made me realize that I didn’t need any complicated system that required maintenance, ran server-side code and required database accesses. I just needed to host some text stored in flat files.
Jekyll
I was building something of my own before I discovered Github Pages and Jekyll, which is an interesting service that compiles your blog inputs into plain html files and hosts them on Github. I have since customized it to my liking.
While it has some limitations by the nature of it being static, it has many benefits. The hosting is free and relatively reliable (I trust that GitHub can keep my pages up more than my cheap web host can). Local development is trivial with the jekyll gem. Pages don’t need to be dynamically generated and thus load extremely quickly. And best of all, there are no vectors for security exploits through the blog itself.
Bootstrap
I also took this as an opportunity to explore what Bootstrap has to offer. While I’m impressed with the wide array of components, styles and utilities provided by Bootstrap, I did find it excessive: I only chose a couple components, yet the generated CSS had much more than I needed. I ended up cutting most of it and customizing it to my needs.
Responsive Design
This isn’t a technology per-se, but it is a pattern or goal. I aimed to make this website readable on all viewport dimensions, from the largest to the smallest iPhone screen. As you resize the page, you’ll notice that the author box reconfigures itself horizontally. As you further compress the viewport, you will notice that things like the logo and links automatically resize.
Content
I’m planning a variety of content for the site. It will include the traditional long-form thoughts and discussions on current events both in my life and in the world around us. I may comment on contemporary political or economic events, or reflect on something in my life.
I am also planning to use this site to share some of the tips or tricks that I wish I had in various points in my life (mostly technical)–i.e. how to do something with VMWare, my vim setup, etc.
Occasionally if I’m doing interesting things that I may talk about (whether at work or outside of work), I will discuss them too.
I may also migrate some of the older content from my previous blogs here, although some may not be appropriate for my age anymore!
You
If these things sound interesting to you, I invite you to participate in the discussion. Currently I have linked up the Facebook comment box plugin, although I may try out other products like Disqus. You can share your thoughts, disagree with my conclusions, bring up novel insights, or whatever you may fancy.