Revive (again)

It’s kind of embarassing, looking back at this previous post. It sounded like I was arriving somewhere, where in fact, those “big changes in my life” just kept rolling. I got married, got a dog, moved house, changed jobs (twice). Where I’ve landed is a place where I’ve seen my creative output trail off, enough to miss it, enough to want to return to it.

I’ll start off by describing the journey that my online presence has taken. I started this blog in 2004, publishing on a Blogger.com site called “A Logical Waste of Space,” which was shared with friend of mine. (His stuff is still there.)

Over time, the kinds of things that we wanted to write about diverged, and it made sense for me to split off. For archival purposes, I’ll keep that site around, even though I’m not too proud of some of the dumb stuff I used to write.

Then, I hosted this site on Squarespace for a while. I like the templates and WYSIWYG design tools that they provide, but felt like my data was trapped. I’m the type of person who likes to work in non-proprietary environments, so I started to look for alternatives.

The current iteration of this site is built using Jekyll, which is a geek’s dream. I’m writing this in a Markdown text file, and Jekyll takes care of compiling it into HTML. I have a DigitalOcean app pointed at a GitHub repo where these text files live, and it updates the site whenever I make changes. Sure, it takes some coding to customize the look of the site, but hey, I know how to do that stuff! It doesn’t even cost anything (unless I get an unexpected uptick in fame).

So, here I am again.