Zach Holman

So I've been wanting to change up the blog a little bit over the last month or so, and I did a spur-of-the-moment thing the last few days and wrote my own blog. I moved from SimpleLog, which I enjoyed but got a little annoyed with some of the performance issues. It was also a bit too much for what I needed, really... it just feels nicer to cut out the bloat and have a nice, quick blog.

So give it a gander and let me know what you think. There'll likely be a few bugs here or there; feel free to let me know and I'll get them fixed up. Since it's now my codebase instead of someone else's I'll probably add some nifty new playthings to the blog every now and then for the heck of it.

This also means that my long infatuation with Apache is no more; this blog now runs on the hip new trendy web server nginx. If I keep going with the trendiness, well, before long I'll be running everything off of git, Merb, Rubinius, S3 and EC2.

It is, of course, written with Ruby on Rails.

Now that I'm done with this whole coding thing, I'll be back to writing super informative blog posts shortly. I've got a bunch of interesting topics to write about that I've been holding off on until I finished the new blog.

So I've finally finished moving my blogging from WordPress, powered by PHP, to SimpleLog, which is powered by Ruby on Rails. Did it for a couple of reasons:

• WordPress just feels a bit heavy to me. I'm just a solo developer who wants to toss his ideas out every now and then; I'd rather have a slimmed-down, simplified tool to do so. I don't need all the extras, really.
• I'm not a PHP developer anymore, and I haven't been for, jeez, 3-4 years or so. I'm deeply in love with Rails, and it makes sense for me to consolidate in that regard. If I want, I can more easily peek under the hood and tweak some code (which I've already done a lot of), or I can easily pop my own code or plugins in it. Actually I've been thinking of writing a few plugins for it already; it'd be good for me to learn more about plugins in Rails and it'd be fun to give back to the community.
• I can move this off to my regular host, Slicehost. Administratively it's a lot easier, and I just love their setup more than the Site5 account I had set up for this blog.

This definitely wasn't enjoyable, though. A 2-3 hour process from download to restyling to server setup to publishing turned into a 2-3 night affair. I was kind of assaulted on all sides... issues with installing my Rails stack on Slicehost, issues with SimpleLog's code, etc. Turns out a lot of the troubles stemmed from a borked deprec recipe, but things should be all sorted now and we should be good to go.

That's a good thing, since I've been wanting to type a few things up lately. We'll get to all of that soon enough. :)