It's About Time
It's nearly 2011, so I figured it was about time I leveled up this blog. I mean, it's a tad embarrassing to be teaching other people how to build Rails apps while my personal site runs a CGI script. Indeed, the cobbler's children have been running around barefoot for far too long. Here's to new shoes—an early Christmas present!
These new HTML5 bits are being served up by Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9. I know, that sounds like total overkill especially when you consider that everything is heavily cached. Why Rails and not a hosted blogging service? First and foremost, because it was fun to build a Rails 3 app from scratch. I think it's important to have always have a side project where you can push the bounds a bit and try new things. Along those lines, I have some ideas for the next iteration of this site that I couldn't implement in an off-the-shelf solution. Second, I wanted to be able to easily write, edit, and post an entry without the hassle of editing long content in a web form. So I came up with a solution that keeps all my content in text files and uses ActiveResource to post and update entries remotely. Finally, with a custom app I was able to migrate over every post I've written since starting back in 2002. All the legacy Blosxom URLs should work, too.
I tried hard to make the transition seamless (that was part of the fun). Please let me know if I missed anything. If you're seeing oddities in your RSS reader, you may just want to resubscribe to the new feed.
Thanks for tuning in! Now that it's easier to post, I hope to do more of it. :-)