Here I am just trying this Jekyll thing out. What a mess.

I really like the whole static-site-builder approach to website writing, but why do these web guys have to use so many awful tools? Just getting Jekyll installed on my Ubuntu machine was almost enough friction to turn me away. I’m still not sure if the executable I’m using was the one from gems or from apt, either way it’s something that’s not likely to change until I reinstall the OS on my laptop.

This actually isn’t my first attempt at writing a post in this system, I spent over an hour trying to work out why it wouldn’t show up on the test site. Turns out that I had just set the date 1 day in the future and so it wasn’t getting displayed yet. That actually seems like a nice system, but I could have used some “posts left to be published” type of indicator in the build output. I’m now left wondering if that post would actually get displayed in the static site tomorrow, or if I would need to issue a rebuild to pull it in, hopefully the latter.

Anyway, we can go ahead and add ‘creating a sane static site generator in a real programming language’ to my backlist of projects.

What I love about this system is being able to write content in markdown in a sane text editor, and then the resulting web content doesn’t require any active server connections, or database interactions. Not that this site is ever going to need to scale to large numbers of active users, but it is nice to keep deployments as simple as possible. If you are debugging db issues on your blog, then something has gone very wrong.

So now to answer the question, why did I create this site? I’ve spent a long time without any publicly facing internet presence other than a few dead social networking accounts. Given that I do a decent amount of creative work, either for my employers or on my own time, I figure there may be some opportunity to use this site as a showcase. Having said that, I really don’t think this will turn into some sort of extended form resume; the ideas I want to express here aren’t always going to be work appropriate.

I actually do like writing my thoughts out, but rarely have I had any real reason to do so. Most of what I have to say isn’t going to be of any use to the general public, and that’s fine, but maybe some of it will be interesting to a few of you out there.