Getting back to writing again

I’m back! Well I’m trying to get back I should probably say. I haven’t been blogging much, my last post was my usual year in review. It isn’t that I havn’t been motivated either or just short of ideas. I won’t even trot out the tired old excuse that my startup is keeping me too busy. No, like a poor craftsman I’m going to go ahead and blame my tools. After using Octopress for a couple of years I’ve found it clunky and awkward (not to mention the project appears dead) and I’m done with it.

So I’ve switched to clean simple Github Pages + Jekyll. No plugins or anything fancy that requires building it. Just markdown, commit and push. I realized that anything more than that makes me less likely to want to write. I also considered checking out Ghost but decided this was more than what I needed.

Thankfully, it was relatively simple to convert over. I just copied the _posts folder. I picked a theme off a shelf and fixed up the styles for Gists and code to use Solarized Light again. Most of my time was wasted removing places I had used some of Octopress’ plugins. These do work with Jekyll fine, but Github doesn’t have support for plugins. In fact it doesn’t even support compiling SCSS which seems kind of lame, so you have to include a compiled version.

That being said it’s working and convenient to blog again. There’s even a vim-jekyll plugin for creating posts quickly.

I’m committed to writing more. When I started this blog I used to write about just about anything that was interesting to me in the moment. I plan to do more of that. It’s ok if it seems boring. I’ve realized the point is more about writing for myself not necessarily thinking about it as writing for an audience.

Let’s see how it goes.