Introduction

I am starting this blog, website, collection of topics, information store (in other words, I’m not sure what I’m really going to do with it yet) to have a place far from my experience with running Wordpress blogs and other software on a personal VPS (Virtual Private Server). Running my own VPS has been educational, but it is not serving me, and is making me regret having one.

What’s a VPS?

A Virtual Private Server, aka VPS, is a server that runs in a virtual machine on a physical server along with a whole lot of other virtual machines. This is a good idea for parceling out resources in a data center, where you have lots and lots of people, companies, etc, that want resources, but don’t want the cost and hassle of supporting physical machines (power, connections, maintenance, and so on).

I have been renting one for the past several years. Up until that time, I had been trying to host my own server out of my home over a rather thin DSL link, and that just wasn’t working. I had poked around on Software as a Service sites that provided blogging-type services, but just was not happy with any of them.

Why the change?

Fast-forward about 6-7 years, and I am completely done with the idea that I want to be a system/network manager for something that costs for more time, energy and money than the enjoyment I get out of it. I have progressed into areas that offer far more interest, and want to spend my time in those pursuits rather than maintaining a server.

So what’s this about?

These are Github Pages, which is a fairly new and rather easy service offered by Github, a well-known web service that offers development teams and individuals hosting for the their repository depots. I find writing much easier in an editor and environment I’m more comfortable than Wordpress provides, having been far more active writing in the wiki I curate with things I learn and want to have in a knowledge base, than I have been at all with Wordpress.

My old Wordpress blogs have served as a collection of things I want to remember from around the web and in the news, and they’ve done okay as that. What I find irksome is the incessant level of comment spam, login spam, and other sorts of silly things that Wordpress sites are rather bad at handling.

With Github pages, I can write in the EOMC (Editor of My Choice) using the tool chain I am most familiar with, including Git. It’s really ideal for me. I write distraction free, without heed for much of anything that is required writing for Wordpress. I write in Markdown (or rather, a dialect/offshoot of it) that lets me speed through writing and get the content out where I can see it and work with it, and leave formatting pretty much alone.

What should we expect to see here?

That all depends. I have been in the mood for writing for some time about the notion of Software As A Craft, and the various implications of that for the people who work in the software creation and maintenance industry. My own personal area of focus currently are web applications, and command line utilities. I expect to be writing about that as I go along.

I might (not sure yet, depends on how much work it turns into) migrate my blogs and my wiki over to these pages. The more I think on it, the idea of having most of what I’ve written for the wiki in a common place with my other writing might actually be helpful to me and to others seeking to know my work and ideas.

Above all, have fun!

That is my latest watch phrase – I don’t want to be doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff. I like to make things, tools, web apps, essays, pictures; and I’d like to be able to easily show them off.

Also, this is fun because I’m learning new tools and integrating with some existing tools that I hold in some esteem.

Come on back

That’s all for now; I hope to be putting writing up with more regularity than I have. I will probably resort to using facetwitgoo for most of the things I used my blogs for previously. This mode of blogging is appealing to me more, as I’ve had a lot of things pent up that I’ve been wanting to say.

Thanks for tuning in!

A Post-Script

I’m not turning on comments here, like I had in my blogs and on the wiki. The primary reason is that hardly anyone ever made a meaningful comment. The vast vast majority was spam, and I just don’t need the hassle of chasing that all down.

If you have a comment, please feel free to email me directly – my email is on my Github account page – I’d love to hear from you. If you send me spam there, I’ll let GMail deal with it.

If you find a bug in the site, go ahead and log it in the issues section of this site’s repository.