First Post! 2009/05/26

I’m finally making a(nother) personal blog, this time with a focus on coding & clay. In the past, I’ve been turned off by the pain of setting up the various blog engines, the vast expanse of terrible and complex themes, and their propensity for tying up my data. Luddite or control-freak, take your pick.

But, I’ve been re-inspired by static blog emitters, most recently the one used by Brent Simmons. I looked at some of the existing emitters and decided to make something vastly simpler and a bit of a MacRuby playground project. In addition to MacRuby, I’m also using a few other great tools:

Pygment for code syntax highlighting
Markdown, in BabyShitGreenCloth mode
SmartyPants for decent typography without much thought
Mercurial to get my feet wet with a DVCS other than git
BitBucket for hosting the repository
Coda for CSS editing
Disqus for comments
OmniGraffle Pro for my lame programmer art

I’m not yet making much use of the “Mac” in MacRuby (and usually running without it since 0.5 is not stable yet), but I have vague thoughts for the future…

A secondary inspiration is to have a spot to post more in-depth and mayhap slightly incendiary Cocoa articles than would be appropriate on our blog at The Omni Group. I’ve written the occasional technical article there, but I don’t like the thought of drowning our mostly non-coder users in a bunch of technobabble.

Finally, in my rare spare time, I work in our new pottery studio. I’ll post some tidbits about that here, but having just mentioned wanting to avoid confusion and boredom by having two topics on a blog, I’m aware this is a bit contradictory. I might split those out into a separate feed, but for now I’ll just confusing and bore the few readers here with my ceramic exploits.