May 24, 2014

I can barely recall why I started a blog. I know it was March 2009 and my first post was about text selection in Adobe Acrobat. I believe I started a blog because I enjoyed writing down my thoughts and occasionally needed more space than I had available on Twitter.

[As an aside, I was surprised to find out that 99.8% of all current Twitter users started as users after me!]

That first blog was hosted on Tumblr and it was incredibly easy to set-up and start writing and posting using MarsEdit. Tumblr was a great introduction to the possibilities of blogging; elegant, stable and well supported. I stayed with Tumblr until 2012 and left for one reason — I wanted to manage my own data. With Tumblr, all my posts were stored in the cloud and I wanted to be more confident that I would always have access to them.

The second version of this blog was hosted on Scriptogr.am and, more importantly, was generated from nice clean markdown files stored on my hard drive. The effort needed to clean up all those original Tumblr posts was huge but the investment has paid me back every time I have moved or updated this blog since then.

I moved from Scriptogr.am for three reasons:

1. The layout (at least with my limited design skills) didn’t work well on mobile devices.
2. Support appeared to be non-existent
3. As a service I wasn’t convinced it was being actively developed and I wanted to host my blog in my own webspace.

I always thought of Dropplets as a temporary solution to host a blog; it was was never the prettiest site in the world and I missed having the means to created a structured site. The Github repository for Dropplets has sat at version 1.6 for a long time now and I thought it was time to move on once again. Confession time. I do like to fiddle with things.

Initially I looked at developing a new site in Octopress but discovered I didn’t get on with the Ruby-ness of it as a platform. After that I tried Pelican using a very basic theme and was very impressed with how simple and logical it is to create a static website. This blog now has a new look and I’m much happier with the results.

About Blogging


Previous post Bertha’s book Much as I love my Kindle there’s a lot to be said for a real book once in a while. I’m amazed just how much book you can get for £7 — one that’s Next post Shoes In the last 20 years I’ve worn out two pairs of ‘work’ shoes and today was the day to retire the second of those pairs. Long ago I learned that I