Hello world,

long promised, but finally here it is: my blog relaunched!

It didn’t go exactly as planned, but in the end, it is the result that counts.

Basically I planned to:

• have the new version online by August last year
• hand code it based on Rails 3 and RefineryCMS
• use my self coded WordPress export plugin
• deploy it on my own root vserver
• use the existing design and refresh it with some HTML5 goodness
• use the existing domain

Let’s see how it really went:

• it is online now, start of 2012 (if it had been a customer project, I’d be fired by now)
• it is based on Octopress
• for exporting the old posts, I used tools already there
• it is deployed on my beloved Heroku
• for now I used the default Octopress theme
• I switched to a new (hopefully better) domain

That’s what I call sticking to a plan! ;-)

The main reson for the delay and the other changes caused by it was me switching the job. From a part time (teacher|coder|admin|author) in July 2011 I changed to a full time web developer at DCS Fürth doing mainly rails projects.

The last months were very intense, but extremely interesting and I learned tons of new stuff. So I decided to put the blog to rest till I have some free time and brain capacity to restart, which is now!

Back then I wanted the blog to be

1. a platform I can publish my posts on (obviously)
2. an experimenting playground where I can sharpen my ruby skills

Because of the second point I decided to code the blog myself. Today this isn’t necessary anymore. I have the whole day to code and learn new things, about which I can talk here. Compared to the projects I’m doing currently at work, a self coded blog is no real challenge anymore.

So I decided to use the most effective way to relaunch now (and still get rid of darn WordPress).

• no (little) manual coding
• writing posts in Markdown and my favorite code editor (guess …)
• deployment without server maintenance by me

Octopress, which is based on the static site generator Jekyll, turned out to be the perfect tool for the job. With almost no effort the base site was set up, the posts exported (more on that in one of the next posts) and the whole thing deployed.

Now I can concentrate on generating content, instead of patching WordPress ;-)

I didn’t export the old comments though, mainly because this is going to be a mostly english site and all old comments are german. So most of my new target audience couldn’t read them anyway.

Concerning the old layout, my one and only favorite designer in the whole world promised me a shiny new one, if I actually stick to writing new posts on a regular basis this time. Otherwise she promised me pain and suffering, lots of it …

Let’s have one last look at the old site, before I finally take it down:

That’s it for today. Expect more infos on the site itself and the technical background in one of the next posts.

So long,
Marc