So it has come to this

June 01st, 2013 · · blog

So, it has finally come to this: a new blog.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with this. I used to blog at http://blog.blergh.be, but that one's gone (and I mean really gone: I no longer have the data - but perhaps Google still has it, I haven't checked). Since then, there's Twitter and App.Net and Facebook to share things, so the need to blog about still has been virtually nonexistant the last few years. Also: my old blog was written in Dutch and I wanted to blog in English now. Times have changed, I want to be open to more parts of the world.

But recently, the urge to start again has been acting up again. However, it hasn't been strong enough to make actually work of the whole thing. In the past I would have sat down and have it done, coding and designing it myself, but it seems I no longer fancy all that work. Part of me still wants to get it done and still wants it to look good, but another - stronger - part of me doesn't want to spend too much time on it. It's not that important.

And so I worked on it, in small increments. There was this issue with inferis.org being hosted at DiscountASP which has been good for me in the past but has been feeling inadequate lately. So I had to move the server to my own VPS. Which also meant moving mail from DiscountAsp to somewhere else (Gmail for now). All in all not that much work, but I had other interests and stuff to do, so progress was slow. And after I moved inferis.org, I had to decide on a blogging platform. I used to use Wordpress and while that's a perfectly nice set of software, I wanted something else. Setting up databases, PHP, etcetera, I couldn't be bothered (ignoring the fact that I did just that for the site my brother hosts on my VPS too, but never mind that). So I looked around, and settled on Octopress. I've used Jekyll in the past, and liked it, so Octopress seemed like a good fit. So I cloned Octopress, and started fiddling. And stopped again, because Other Important Things needed my attention.

But the desire to blog still ached. I found myself thinking "this would be worth blogging about", but due to the lack of a blog that wasn't going to happen, of course. So I continued my tinkering. I managed to decide to host on Github pages (who needs a VPS anyway), and even set up the DNS correctly. But blog.inferis.org kept showing a 404 with me thinking "I'll work on it tonight" but then never doing anything for it that night (every night). Four kids and a busy job can do that for you, I guess.

Not so this weekend. The noise in my head was finally peaceful enough to actually do something with this blog. So I looked for a theme to use, wrote this post, configured some more stuff until I was content enough to put something online. It's not finished yet, and it will probably never be. But now I have this platform again to post my ramblings (I guess most of it will be coding stuff), and I can work on it and improve it incrementally. At least: that's the idea.

We'll see how far it brings me. ;)