You may notice that this blog has gone through a substantial revamp. It’s not only a cosmetic revamp, but an architectural one as well. You see, dear reader, I got totally sick of dealing with having to update Wordpress every few days because of a new vulnerability, so I decided to migrate off of it.

After looking around for a new blog engine and not finding anything that sounded really neat, I finally stumbled on Octopress. Octopress is totally different from Wordpress, in that you write posts in Markdown, and then kick off a Ruby script that will massage the structure of the Markdown posts and crank out static HTML, which you then can upload to your choice of web host provider.

I’m addicted to Markdown at the moment, mostly because it lets you use a lightweight markup language to do basic formatting, but stays out of your way while writing. I’ve also got a fair amount of tools that ‘speak’ Markdown now, and after lots of pondering, I decided to move things to Octopress. What you see now is the fruit of a couple of weeks of messing around.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of this migration (at least, not yet), but I will say one thing that I think is cool. Instead of needing a bunch of infrastructure on the server side like Wordpress does, all I need for the site now is a simple web server. Matter of fact, I’m not even using a ‘real’ web server – this site is now being delivered straight out of an Amazon S3 bucket, with no ‘server’ for me to manage. This is one less thing I need to monitor and mess with. And just in case things get wonky, I’ve put CloudFlare as a CDN in front of the S3 bucket, so y’all should get lightning-fast performance out of this.

Bear with me as I continue to tweak and improve the site over time. I still have to migrate the few static “pages” I had in Wordpress, but 98% of the stuff has come across, and I decided to launch this revamp now rather than wait any longer. Please drop me a comment here, and let me know what you think!