Charlie Sharpsteen2010-05-11T22:38:33-05:00http://www.sharpsteen.net/Charlie Sharpsteenchuck@sharpsteen.netReboot 2010: New Site2010-05-09T00:00:00-05:00http://www.sharpsteen.net/2010/05/09/reboot-2010-part-1<div class='highlight'><pre><code class='ruby'><span class='n'>get</span> <span class='s1'>'/'</span> <span class='k'>do</span>
<span class='nb'>puts</span> <span class='s2'>"Hello, world! (again)"</span>
<span class='k'>end</span>
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>I finally got around to my annual spring cleaning and decided to kick it off with a redesign of this website. The old site was managed using the <a href='http://drupal.org'>Drupal</a> content management system and I never really did much with it. I have come to the realization that the reason I never did much with Drupal may be that it was the wrong tool for the job. Drupal was designed to provide services such as blogging to a <em>community</em> of people– and by myself I don’t constitute a community by any definition. Simply put, Drupal was an overkill solution for managing a personal site.</p>
<p>I pondered other blogging platforms such as <a href='http://wordpress.org'>Wordpress</a> and <a href='http://posterous.com'>Posterous</a>. Posterous is interesting in that it allows you to publish content simply by emailing a post to their website. However, in the end I decided that using some sort of blogging platform to manage my website was again overkill.</p>
<p>Blogging is not something I really expect to do with this site– I can hardly keep a journal! What I do want to do with this site is record interesting tidbits of information or recipes for completing certain tasks for future reference by myself and others. I would also like a spot to publish some of my work so that others can find it.</p>
<p>In the end, <a href='http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.html'>this post</a> by Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub, convinced me to try using <a href='http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll'>Jekyll</a> to manage my site. Jekyll is a little Ruby program, that compiles a set of folders containing content into a static website.</p>
<p>A blog compiler! Now someone is speaking my language.</p>
<p>The best part is that I don’t have to learn any new tools. I don’t have to spend my evenings figuring out what all the buttons on the WordPress or Posterous control panels do. I just fire up my text editor, write down the things I want to record, and then recompile my website. I can also track changes to posts using a version control system like git which fits more with my vision of this site as a place to store persistent documents like how-tos.</p>
<p>At some point I plan to write a piece describing how I set up Jekyll to run on my <a href='http://webfaction.com'>Webfaction</a> hosted website such that it automatically refreshes every time I push new changes to my <a href='http://github.com/sharpie/sharpsteen.net'>GitHub</a> repository.</p>
<p>Stay tuned!</p>