Once again, I have started a blog, and once again, the first post is to say “This time will be different! I’m going to write, really!” I tend to start blogs when I have a lot of other more important things to be doing, and I just started studying in earnest for doctoral exams; you can do the math for that yourself. Partly as a result of studying for said exams, I’m often thinking about things that I should write down, and here’s where I’m going to write them (here we see Michael justifying his newest procrastination technique).
About the blog
I used to write my website in PHP, because that’s the only way I knew to include extra content (headers, footers, etc.) in all of my HTML files (I think this is a pretty common way people get into PHP, incidentally). I have since decided that I hate PHP, despite the fact that most of my work at CHMTL is in PHP. After a brief stint with Mojolicious (I do love Perl, after all), I decided to rewrite the site using Sinatra: I like Ruby (Perl with a non-insane object system), and I don’t need all the complexity of Rails.
After spending a couple of hours hacking in Sinatra to get a blog working without a database, I realized that someone had already done all of that hard work, so I decided to use Jekyll instead. I hadn’t planned to have any real dynamic content on the site anyway, so something like a static site generator will be fine for my purposes, I think. Besides, it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days, and I can host it for free on Github Pages.
More real content later, but for now, a warning (with a hat tip to xkcd): this blog will occasionally contain strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), computer talk (which may be unsuitable for musicians), jazz (which may be unsuitable for squares), and music theory (which is definitely unsuitable for any reasonable person).