I just launched a new version of my blog, and you’re looking at it :). I’ve went through a number of platforms, most recently habari, which I still have a lot of love for.

But my installation was going rapidly out of date, was becoming very slow due to using Sqlite as a backend, and most of all, I wanted to use GitHub to store my posts so everyone can make edits.

So I settled on using Jekyll, hosted on GitHub pages. Biggest drawback: it’s all 100% static, so I had to use Disqus to enable comments. Don’t really like the idea of someone else owning my precious, precious data, but alas… I’m in the ‘cloud services business’ myself, and you gotta practice what you preach.

The first responses have been an overwhelming “weren’t you able to find a better template anywhere?”. I’m obviously not much a visual artist myself, so I had no problem with the concept. But it’s hard to find solid minimalistic designs, and I really wanted a strong focus on actual content, and a great mobile experience, so I’ve had some trouble finding things that matched those objectives.

Regardless, I’m quite happy with the look of embedded code, I mean… I think this looks pretty sweet:

<?php

include __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

use Sabre\XML;

$reader = new XML\Reader();
$reader->open('atom.xml');

$output = $reader->parse();
var_dump($output);

If you recognize the color scheme, indeed.. It’s the old vim ‘desert’ scheme ported to css.

I also ditched the old domainname (rooftopsolutions.nl). I started ‘Rooftop Solutions’ when I was a 17-year old kid, over 10 years ago. This has been my moniker ever since, but recently I officially ‘shut down’ this business when I moved from Münster, Germany to London.

Figured I might as well start fresh and use my real name.

While we’re on the topic of London. If you’re reading this and happen to also live in London. If you’re up for some armchair philosophy or programming discussions over a pint, I’m still pretty new here and in the market for friends, so drop me a line!

To conclude: I hope a new system will encourage me to do a better job at blogging. I’ve been pretty shit last year, and this is my first post of 2013.

I’m actually not sure how relevant blogs still are in 2013. There’s definitely been a steep decline, but I enjoy the medium as a consumer and I reckon 10 years down the road older blog posts may still hold some relevancy, unlike compressed twitter discussions with little context.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me. If you have any criticisms or suggestions, I’d love to hear it!