Alastair’s Place

Software development, Cocoa, Objective-C, life. Stuff like that.

Been a While

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote a blog post on my own site. Partly this is because I’ve been busy with work. Partly it’s because I’ve been busy with life. Mostly it’s been because I haven’t had the time to configure a server to host it since we moved the company site to its current location.

One might retort that I could just have set something up on TypePad, or Blogger or some such, and that’s true, but it doesn’t really provide the kind of service I’m after. So I waited, thinking that eventually I’d get around to organising myself another server with MovableType on it. Of course, this never happened (too busy), so the situation persisted, and in the meantime I’ve built up quite a few things I wanted to say, but didn’t really have anywhere to say them.

Then, just the other day, we received the sad news that Steve Jobs, the visionary behind Apple, NeXT, Pixar and all of the great work that flowed forth from those companies, died. Sure, I posted something brief on my company’s blog, but more than that doesn’t seem appropriate for that location.

Anyway, in the meantime, Matt Gemmell had been talking about changing blogging platform as a result of persistent performance problems with WordPress, and indeed had actually switched to Octopress. MovableType, my previous blogging platform of choice, doesn’t suffer from the performance issues that plague dynamic blogging software such as WordPress, but Octopress does offer other advantages, especially the fact that posts are stored in plain text files, under version control.

So, I’m switching. This does mean that it might be a little while before my website settles back down again, and I’m intending to move one or two things about a bit. Plus I’m vain enough to want my blog to look unique, so now I have a new blog theme to design. But hey… it’s all fun.