Why Start from Scratch?
Seriously! Why would I want to start a new blog? After all I already one one at blog.airness.de. So why start from scratch?
In short: I need a place where I can easily dump ideas and where people that are interested in stuff like that can find it.
If you are interested in the long story, read on …
Prior Blogging
For my prior blog at blog.airness.de I used wordpress. That worked well for me for quite a while. I even ventured a bit deeper by writing some small plugins for it. Just eventually my blog became bloated with too many sidebars and thereby also quite slow. Worst of all, everything distracts from the main thing, which is the content.
I also ended up with two handful of drafts piling up that I never finished. Of course I mainly have to blame that on myself for being lazy but I also felt that in parts the process of posting and writing was too clumsy for me.
Then I ventured into drupal for a longer while. I really loved it at still do. At some point I will for sure use it for a bigger project but for what I want to do here, drupal has just too much power. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, just toooooo much.
Geek? Geek!
I am a geek by heart. Took me a while to admit that but I guess it had to be said :) I love technology and trying out new stuff. So why not try jekyll?
It is plain, clean and easy. I write my posts in plain text files (that I use for all kinds of stuff anyways), and I can use markdown syntax for the formatting! Nice!
To top things, I can host the whole thing at GitHub Pages, pushing new post via git. Even nicer!
Almost Like a Longer Tweet
I find myself using twitter fairly frequently lately. It is quite a useful tool for a bunch of different purposes but I have to agree with Dave Winer when it comes to the arbitrary 140 character limit: It is useless. Sometimes you just need to say a little bit more :)
So for all things that just break the 140 characters by a bit, I will be using this blog as well, and then point people to my posts from twitter, if I consider them relevant enough.
Idea Curation
We all have ideas, all the time. Most of them pass and for most of them it is good that way. Some others stick around for a bit longer.
Now I will finally have a place where I can collect them to get input from others wrt their usefulness and support in implementing them.
Inspiration
This blog is a fork of Zach Holdman’s Blog. As you see I even kept his design because I am too lazy to change things and I just want something to get started. If you should ever find this Zach, bare with me. It’s open source after all, right? :)
I also kind of like the idea of the timeless repository. Maybe I will morph jekyll into behaving like that one day, who knows.
For now, this is just a start. I will see where this leads.