Alright, so, as nobody at this point will know anymore, I’ve always used my personal site as a technical experiment - probably because I couldn’t be bothered to create one without doing something interesting in the process. This started in highschool with my very first personal page, which had some funky left-right switching behavior in JavaScript. I’d love to dig that one up, but I think the source code has been lost. I don’t even really remember what the next site was like, except that I went all out on a completely custom PhotoShop design (playing around with graphic design was my thang back then, which is ironic considering that I’m typing this in a VIM terminal that doesn’t even have code coloring. Which, granted, is kind of bothersome).
When I discovered Ember.js, really rather soon after its inception, I knew I wanted to do something with that, and even started a brief experiment porting my blog to it, the fruits of which are actually still present on GitHub. Of course having a blog in Ember.js is all sorts of stupid for all sorts of reasons, but that never held me back in my blogging endeavours, so why would it now, right? Although that particular pet project never saw the light of day, something big came out of it regardless, because it gave me enough experience to write the first SRXP webapp using Ember.js. And to this day, the SRXP webapp still uses Ember.js.
A few years later I really had the intention of writing more blog posts (I had this idea I was going to do race blogging) and I figured I needed something to facilitate that. I think by chance I stumbled upon HubPress (through HackerNews, probably?) which was wrapping GitHub Pages with some client side magic to give you an editor. Seemed like a fun experiment, but honestly with more than a few posts the experience was so slow and unreliable I basically stopped using it altogether. It seems the HubPress repo has since been marked read only and the project is unmaintained, so apparently that never got past the stage of “fun experiment”.
Which brings us to today. I’m not sure I’m going to stop the experimentation altogether, but recently I find myself having… thoughts. Thoughts that want out. Preferably by means of frantic typing. Now a blog engine that takes 15 minutes to save your post and then most probably crashes isn’t super conducive to this situation, so I figured I’m going full on boring and installed Jekyll for GitHub Pages. Two Ruby version managers and a couple of failed link / compilation cycles later, here we are! A boring new blog. I’ll probably be moving all my old posts over one by one (no rush), and then… let the frantic typing commence.
Update: I should probably mention the hours I spent shouting at GitHub for failing to build my Jekyll blog and converting over the old HubPress asciidoc files to something I could render here (without being able to using the asciidoc plugin for Jekyll). That was after I wrote this post.