Same old blogger, brand new platform.
Those who have known me for awhile know that I enjoy tinkering, sharing what I learn, and writing. Since 2014 I have maintained a personal blog, though I fell off from updating it in 2018. Why? It started as another tinkering project. I claimed digital squatters rights on domain names using my last name and I wanted to experiment with running a web server on my long-outdated 2007 Dell XPS laptop. I chose to use the now-defunct Octopress blogging platform, which was an interesting and fun Ruby-based platform forked off of Jekyll.
Even as Octopress creator, Brandon Mathis, acknowledged the platform’s shortcomings and pulled support for it, I soldiered on and migrated the blog from the Dell to a Digital Ocean host. Looking back, it’s amusing to see how many posts were along the lines of “Apple updated its built-in Ruby environment and now Octopress is broken again.” Every time I would get inspired to write, launch terminal, and fire off a bundle exec rake new_post[“title”] command, Octopress would break again. I should state that while I’m curious and better with computers than many, I’m not a programmer. The learning opportunities from this were always fun, but never worth it to me. Invariably, I would lose steam and walk away. In the meantime, along comes another update, ensuring my Sisyphean task would continue…
… until now. I’m on to new ideas, new projects, and new ways to tinker. I want to focus on what I have to share more than the technology with which to share it. To that end, I have switched over to Wix, which offers a well-maintained and easy-to-use blogging platform. While I’ve lost a lot of the granular control I had with Octopress, I also don’t have to spend so much damned time fiddling with it. I will likely migrate some of the more interesting articles I wrote on the OG vertner.net over time. While I appreciate the successes I earned in the process of building and maintaining my old blog, I’m also proud of all of the failures which have provided me with so many lessons learned!
