I’ve been lazy and haven’t updated my site regularly for some time. The old site is here.

For some time I’ve wanted to start blogging, but as is often the case, when I start looking at the popular software it all seems like a major time commitment to make it do what I really want. I came closest with WordPress, where I spent some energy on code, and blogspot (protosite here), which looked simple enough and easy to extract the content from later. I was really itching to write something simple to get started, but didn’t have the plan in my head.

However, I am really overdue to start some cloud architecture and technology evangelism, so figuring out the solution had hit the top10 of my todofile.

This week I stumbled upon Jekyll, which implemented an even better version of a simple geekly system for blogging. It’s written in ruby, which isn’t my favorite, but integrates simple logic to support various simple text markup systems (I’m using textile, which is the default).

All you do is edit text files and run jekyll to re-assemble your site into static files. Most people using jekyll use an offboard commenting engine, often disqus. Edit, assemble, rsync to the final location, done. It can be automated in various ways (often based on using git or other source code control systems).

Anyway, what you see is the first version. I’ll probably find someone to work with me on layout/design. Something more like the blogspot template, perhaps.

And if I get too frustrated or decide I can’t stand ruby, I can always write something in perl to take the source files and do things differently.

Thanks, Tom, Nick, and the other Jekyll contributors!