A new blogApril 7th, 2012Cristiano Betta1 minute read

It has been a while since I last blogged, and to be fair I've been kinda busy, but I also was frustrated with my old blog. It was bloated and heavy to load, all mainly due to Wordpress and Site5's shared hosting. Wordpress started as a nice blogging platform but lately it has been pissing me off (more on this), and I realised that running a whole PHP script for pages that barely ever change is stupid.

So here is the new blog. The old one is still available here as a static HTML archive (hence why it loads so fast).

This new blog is built using Octopress, which is a "blog aware static site generator". Basically what it does is convert a whole folder of template files and blog posts written in MarkDown into a whole folder of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I've been using a few simple frameworks like Nanoc and Jekyll for work and event management recently and I loved the speed. No database and no server side scripting results in super fast load times, combing that with the hosting on Github (see here to learn how to do this yourself) makes it even faster.

But let's quit talking about the technical details of my blog, or maybe not. I definitely want to share some more techie things here, highlight some of the code I personally write, workflows we use at EmberAds, and software I love using. Although it's fun to blog about anything at random, I rather make this blog a bit more topical (hence the cheesy title).