Switching to Octopress

I’ve been looking into Octopress for a month or so now and I finally decided to take the plunge. As of now, this blog is now powered by Octopress (more or less out of the box) instead of WordPress. I’d like to change the theme a bit, but it’s good enough that I’ll leave it for now.

WordPress -> Octopress

Nothing was wrong with WordPress itself, but I just didn’t use any of the features it offered. I’d rather just type the blog posts in a regular editor instead of a textbox on a webpage. There are some great tools out there that help with that of course, but I just don’t need the features there either. In addition, maintaining WordPress means logging in pretty often to check for updates, apply them, make sure the database is backed up, etc. All of that would be just fine if I received enough benefit to offset the time there, but I just didn’t.

Enter Heroku

In addition to switching the blogging engine, I moved the physical blog from Linode over to Heroku + Amazon S3. My blog is very low traffic, so I don’t need a high powered VPS host that I have to maintain & patch. Heroku offers a free account if you don’t need much power and can live without a database (well, effectively without a DB – a 5MB one is included). I decided to go ahead and put any post specific images/files onto S3 since Heroku offers a limited amount of local storage and I can also redeploy back to Linode if something doesn’t work out at Heroku. For the record though, I love Linode for a Linux VPS host. I highly recommend them as long as you’re comfortable dealing with Linux via the command line.

Simplicity

As I get older, the technology side of things appeals to me less and less. I still love technology in general, but the nitty gritty details of what platform/framework/OS/whatever is the best is less and less interesting to me. I’m more interested in the best way to deliver a solution in a way that is as simple as possible. That doesn’t mean I’m adverse to complexity under the hood though. It means I value the experience, productivity, and the ability to simply get things done over the technical aspects of a solution.

Looking Back on 2011

2011 was a crazy year for me. It was a year full of change. This year I:

Started dating my beautiful girlfriend
Watched the last launch of Space Shuttle Discovery from the NASA press site thanks to the STS-133 NASATweetup
Took a great vacation to Charleston, SC
Turned 30
Moved 2200 miles from the East Coast to the West Coast for a new job
Began working a dream job in the space industry

There were some low points in 2011, but overall, it’s been a good year. In a lot of ways, I feel like 2011 was a transitional year. All of the change is mostly finished at this point, so it feels like it’s time for the good stuff to begin. I’m really excited about 2012 – I think like it’s going to be an amazing year.

Blog Block

I really thought I’d have a lot to blog about since this whole week was a
pretty crazy cross country adventure…but I can’t seem to focus on blogging
at the moment. I don’t know if it’s just a writer’s block thing or what.
Whenever I sit down to write, I keep thinking I’m writing out some formal
document and that ends up causing me to keep thinking about it and then I just
stop. My goal is to blog more now that I’m out in LA and I have lots of
friends around the country that will probably be interested in updates. At
this point, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I thought about just using
Tumblr instead of my own custom WordPress install or I may simply start fresh
with this domain. I’ll definitely find a way to send out updates on my LA
adventure, but it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer.

One quick update though – I did make it to LA just fine and both kitties made
it smoothly. My furniture isn’t here yet, so my apartment is basically empty
at the moment, but at least I’m here. I’ll post more in the near future, but
so far, so good.