Blog Reboot
I’m in the process of migrating my blog to RapidWeaver. This may seem like a step backwards for someone who has developed their own web site from scratch, but to me it’s more about focus.
You see, about a year and a half ago - after many years as a Windows guy - I decided to give the Macintosh a try. I had many specific reasons but the overarching theme was that I wanted to spend more time using my home computer to get things done and less time tinkering, experimenting and researching how best to do things. It’s a trap programmers often fall in: instead of doing something simple like writing a program to create a report, you spend time researching reporting languages or learning report writers or figuring out how to automate Excel to do the report (because it’s ever so close to what you want), and on and on. And after wasting days or weeks on those distractions, you inevitably come to the same conclusion: it would be easier if you just wrote a custom reporting system yourself. In fact, what you really need is a reporting grammar because what problem today can’t best be solved with a DSL?
So then you’re off looking at parsing tools and trying to decide which one best fits your problem, but since all the simple ones have really only been designed to parse math expressions and all the fully-featured ones were really designed to parse the language they were written in, you come to that same conclusion again: you could probably just design a simple parser generator for reporting grammars on your own. Really, how hard can that be?
And then hopefully, you stop. And think. And try to wind your way backwards along the thread in your mind that led you down this path back to ... what was I trying to do? Oh yeah, create a simple report.
So that’s how I ended up writing a blog from scratch. And how I spent much more time building, tweaking and maintaining the site then I spent writing posts for the site. Which is precisely how I ended up with this new version of my blog, using RapidWeaver. It allows me to easily post blog entries, share photos and videos, but still gives me a lot of control of the site without turning this into a programming project.
That doesn't mean I won't do some hacking of RW (which I've already done, and I'll talk about more later), but I'm hoping I won't get sucked in like I did before.