For someone whose livelihood depends on people blogging, I’ve been a surprisingly terrible blogger.
Still, I started thinking that I should start up again. One of the issues that made it more difficult, I think, was the relative difficulty of writing posts in a web form. It is, of course, easy enough to write posts in a text editor and post then from there, but somehow I was never able to bring myself to do that. I’ve also been concerned for a long time about what I’d do if I ever wanted to move this blog somewhere else; I set it up running Scoop, which has treated me very well over the years, but is both overkill for a personal site and rather resource intensive.
A few days ago, I finally started looking into Octopress. I had mixed feelings about it at first, but the idea of keeping a blog in a git repo started appealing to me, and I do like that it’s pretty light on resource usage. I was feeling inspired the other night, so after I got caught up on my long neglected astro logs, I wrote a conversion script to import the Scoop posts to Octopress, futzed about with the design a little bit, made some tweaks to make me happier and ease the transition, and here we are. A bit of massaging with the Octopress permalink generation and some lighttpd rewriting magic even preserves the old links. I feel a little sad moving on from Scoop, but I think this will work better in the future.
I wouldn’t call this a “relaunching”, because that sounds dumb, but I have every hope and intention of being more regular about doing this. I come across a lot of interesting problems that I have to solve, and the solutions for them just vanish because I’m too lazy to write them down. If I make it easier for myself to keep up with it, maybe I will. Hell, I really need to get my telescope building projects written up.
Finally, while I appended the comments from the old site to the stories that had them, I have not enabled comments with the new site yet. I feel kind of iffy about Disqus comments, honestly. I may decide to enable them later, but I’m too weirded out by the idea of putting externally hosted comments on here to do it right now. I’m keeping the Twitter & Google+ buttons for the time being, but leaving the Facebook “Like” buttons off just because.
Update Eh, I decided to try out Disqus comments after all. As weird as they make me feel, not having comments at all felt weirder.
comments powered by Disqus