An explanation as to why I stopped writing on the old blog and my promise to write more frequently on this one.

Why the sudden change of heart?

I abandoned my old blog some time ago. I found it was harder to motivate myself to write by dumping everything into a tiny textarea. I found myself editing in my favorite editor (vim) because I didn’t trust my browser and didn’t really want to write in some AJAX monstrosity to save as I went. I work much faster in vim, I’m in it all day anyways, so what better place is there from which to do my blogging?

Furthermore, I found my interests shifting a bit. I do a lot more tinkering with rails at work. I think there’s definitely something to be said for the degree of freedom you get from working with smaller frameworks like Sinatra. I like that you can decide on the structure and that the application is exactly as big as you need it to be, and no bigger. I’ve been using Sinatra every chance I get to prototype a future feature or app as its own mini-application. I will probably end up throwing away a good deal of background code this way, but plenty of it can be salvaged when it gets moved over to rails.

I love the feel of starting a new project. Like dogs, ruby projects are so fun when they’re young. I really like being able to play around with new libraries, write view code in haml/sass, and pretend like I’m a simple design purist, even when I usually can’t afford to be.

Because of this, I have taken up the blogging platform Marley. I have made some modifications to it and will probably continue to do so. It’s a robust platform, has a small footprint and is very flexible in how how can do your updates.

Why does the site look like this now?

Because I suck at design. I think it looks alright though. I like simple layouts, both from an aesthetic standpoing and from a standpoint of not wanting to spend all day trying to hack together something that looks better.

How long until you abandon this blog as well?

I will probably be able to keep up regular posting until school gets really busy or in the rare event I get a life. Don’t hold your breath on the latter, though.