Hello, World

So yet another first post for yet another blog.

After using Posterous since last April I finally got frustrated with issues when logging in to edit posts (it didn’t recognise I had logged in), the poor support for inline code snippits (also mentioned by Jalada) and the odd theme problems such as text boxes stretching off the right hand side of the screen.

I did some poking around and looking for a replacement. I glanced briefly at tumblr but it was far too Web 2.0 for what I wanted. It also potentially suffered from the same problems posterous had since it was all hosted elsewhere. I decided I wanted a solution hosted on my own webspace.

I had already ruled out Wordpress as having used it in the past it is too bloated and hard to customise for my needs. I know (X)HTML and CSS fairly well and don’t want to deal with a complex templating system or have to wade through large amounts of bad PHP code to change the design of my site.

A colleague of mine, recommended I take a look at Habari as it strongly favoured open standards and it was written from the ground up to be a modern blog platform, learning from the mistakes others had made in the past. I installed it and poked around a bit and it looked pretty good at first until I found it was a pain in the neck to get it to do code snippits in posts. Habari was out. (Okay - I’ll admit I’m picky!)

I then went back to jekyll, the system Jalada had mentioned in his original post. At first I had discounted it as it seemed tied quite closely to git which I had used in the past and hadn’t found it to be as wonderful as the rest of the world clamed it to be. Coming back to it though I figured that the rest of the jekyll philosophy did fit very well with my way of working, I use the terminal a lot (I’m writing this at work where I have to use a windows machine and still have a screen full of terminals open) and as a programmer the idea of keeping my website under version control and generating it as static files appealed greatly. It also gave me an excuse to check out git again to see if I could find out why everyone raved about it so much.

So with this decision made I spent some time at my parents house playing around with jekyll on my laptop and it seemed to work well. I nabbed a copy of someone elses site to start me off and with a few pointers from Jalada was soon up and running. When I got back home the next day I decided it was the way I wanted to go so I set it up and started playing resulting in this, the first post. I’ll hopefully be making a lot of changes as I customise the site for myself over this coming weekend but for now I have a site and have a post.