New Blog Design
I have been meaning to write some blog posts for a while now, but have instead ended up tinkering with the code behind this site or drinking beer instead. I finally said enough is enough and had Bedrich Rios make a new design for me as the last one was very ... awful. This has spurred me to get more active with my own website. I have some things in the works, other than blog posts.
One upcoming section of this site will be for my running where I plan to show some cool graphs and trails pertaining to my training for marathons. The other section will be for the travels I have done and are upcoming, as that is a big part of my life. I would like this site to be more of a stream of my work, photos, travels, running, and whatever else is interesting me at the time. So look out for some of those sections soon! Thanks Bedrich and all those nudging me to blog!
Some Blog Changes
So, I'm making some changes to my blog. The first change is switching from rackspace cloud sites to a linode VPS. My personal experience with rackspace cloud was not the best. It went down more often than I would've expected and I had ongoing security issues involving their ftp access. I also felt the need for more control over my environment which I simply wasn't going to get with shared hosting. So far linode has been wonderful and I hope it stays that way.
The second, more obvious change is that I am using a blog engine I have been developing in my spare time. The project is called foresmo and still has a ways to go, but I'm enjoying it so far. Why create yet another blog engine? Well, a couple reasons. First and foremost, many of the popular blogging engines out there have awful codebases and although they may be easily extended with plugins, working with the core is just a nightmare. There are some shining lights out there, such as Habari, however I personally feel the admin UI is too minimalistic. I also simply enjoy working on it as a real blogging engine has some interesting problems and I like solving them. I am building foresmo on top of the SolarPHP framework, which I must admit I am a fan of. It is definitely making things easier for the project. Being able to provide database abstraction, caching adapters, and better searching (using google, sphinx, lucene, or fulltext) straight out of the box are some of things I am aiming to provide and SolarPHP helps me do that.
Anyways, I'm sure this blog will see the effects of the ongoing development, so I apologize in advance for any weirdness you may encounter.