You may have noticed the new digs. You may have noticed I actually posted something. You may have a noticed a terrible mental visual in your head. Yeah, sorry about that last one. I am starting my blog anew. I have ported over the last few posts that were worthwhile and am primed to get going. However, I made some changes I feel are worth sharing.

So, as it makes sense, I'm gonna blog about the progression of my site. First things first, I am working on the content. First, I'm trying to write it. Nothing groundbreaking, but worthwhile, hopefully. The content is structured in HTML5 (hopefully semantically). Basic navigational elements? Check. Pithy Bio? Check. My profiles on other sites? Check. So what's missing?

So, a quick note letting you know (in case you couldn't tell) I moved the blog back to Wordpress. I tried out Tumblr because it is very convenient and simple. I wanted something with less upkeep. But the lack of flexibility really started to bother me. It's a great blogging system, but as it turns out, I wanted more features. So, I'm back to WordPress. That is all.

As you may or may not know, I work for Gerson Lehrman Group as a UI Engineer. While this is more of my professional site, I don't talk a lot about my work. Truth is, I really dig it here. I work with some fantastic fellow UI Engineers: Garann Means, Zubin Tiku and Chris Bosco (and some others but I don't know their blog URLs, hint, hint).

Yes, it's that time of the year. Time for me to do another half assed design. This one looks particularly half baked, I know. But this one has rhyme and reason where the others were just laziness. This is still a transitional design, but instead of going naked, I'm going for a few simple design principles and then will fill in the rest as I go.

So, I've been doing this Rails tutorial off and on for the last month or so, time permitting. People ask me "Why are you learning Rails?". I tell them it's an easy way for me to get introduced to Ruby. I'm not a proper developer by training. I don't think in the same terms most developers do. I can't just sit down, learn a new syntax and then wield the awesome powers of the new language. I have to relate it to something I know. I know web apps. So Rails teaches me some of the Ruby basics while letting me relate everything back to something I feel comfortable with. Yes, I know there are differing opinions on Rails and there is a bunch of stuff it adds to Ruby that isn't really Ruby itself, but that's ok. It's just a starting point.

So, over the weekend, I relaunched my blog on Node.js. I tried Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress (hosted and self), Django, Rails and was just about to rebuild it in Sinatra when a friend suggested I just build it in Node. Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

So, I upgraded the db version on this blog and in doing so, I forgot to backup the comments. I apologize to both of you that lost your comments. Lesson learned, back up the db before I upgrade it.

I'm following the trend and moving over to Octopress. While I do love my custom node blog, the amount of work it took to get a new post up and the stack it required for a simple blog was just overkill. It was a fun experiment and I will continue to play with node in all sorts of varieties, I just am not interested in rolling my own blog in it for now. Enter Octopress.