Over the years, my writing has been very sparse. I enjoy writing, but just don't push myself to do it. Here's another attempt at getting going again.

Some history of my public sites...

Initial Foray

2008: I started a new job and started blogging somewhat consistently for several months. At the time, I chose wordpress.com to host the blog and just started writing.

2009: I stood up a simple web server with HTML and CSS I wrote by hand to host my domain site. It was pretty basic with some links to web sites I was developing, my LinkedIn profile, and some social media.

Wordpress / Split Sites

In July 2012, after contemplating a move from wordpress.com, I decided to split the blog, In Search of Equilibrium, into two parts: 1) a technical blog with a new name, One Side of Equilibrium and 2) a blog focused on personal interests retaining the original name. I continued to host One Side of Equilibrium on wordpress.com, but stood up my own installation of Wordpress hosted on Amazon EC2. The latter replaced the static html site from 2009.

I thought the split would provide encouragement to write more by focusing on non-technical topics. It did not really come to fruition.

Octopress

In the fall of 2013, I read that a colleague and friend was migrating his blog to Octopress. I looked into it a little and discovered, with Octopress, you basically do everything at the command line and a text editor. It compiles markdown text to HTML and deploys it to your basic file-based web server and, voila, your site is available. This excited me for a few reasons:

• I love the command line
• I love simple text editors
• A database seems like overkill for hosting simple, static text to serve a web page
• I'm pretty fond of Markdown as it reminds of my early years with word processing software pre-dating WYSYWIG (WordPerfect and, probably WordStar)

Almost immediately, I converted my installation of Wordpress to Octopress.

But I did not write anything. Why? I wish I knew.

Nikola

Octopress is built with Ruby. I never really got into Ruby. The early years of Ruby on Rails were exciting times for breaking the rules of app development on Java and .NET and I learned it. I don't know why it didn't take with me.

But Python did. My personal projects are all Python-based. My development environment, the same one where I would write, is setup for Python. Everytime I would get an idea to write about, I would have to refresh myself on rvm. If I had just upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu/Mint (a fresh install each time), I would have to set it up. By the time I got past this, my drive to write would be gone.

I decided last month to dig a little deeper. Is there a static site generator out there based on Python? Why yes! There are several, notably:

• Hyde
• Pelican
• Nikola

I spent very little time deciding to go with Nikola, despite its defacto standard of reStructured text. It does support markdown as I prefer to work with. I decided also to merge the content from One Side of Equilibrium back into this site and delete my wordpress.com site.

As of this month, the site is now generated using Nikola.