New Beginnings

It has taken me (literally) years to make a new website and redo my blog. For nearly a decade I have been using an open source blog platform called Subtext. It has been defunct for over five years when its original creator decided to move onto other things.

I decided it was time for me to do the same.

What took me so long was deciding what platform I wanted to use next. I knew that I wanted more control over the process and wanted to get away from dynamically generated content. It’s slower than static pages, and since control also means not being locked into a particular server technology, I decided that dynamically generated content was out.

Jekyll and Octopress looked very promising, but ultimately, they looked like more hassle than what I was interested in.

I then stumbled upon Cactus. Though I did have to learn some Python to get it to do exactly what I wanted, it turned out to be a good fit for not just starting over, but it was (relatively) easy to move all my existing content over.

The thing that stopped me from doing this sooner was having to do all the work associated with redirecting my old URLs to a new ones. Migration would involve needing to understand the dynamically generated URLs for my old blog and setting up the server to 301 them to the new URLs. It turned out the work was much simpler than I had anticipated.

And I feel like an idiot for not doing this sooner, but here’s to a new year and new beginnings.