My dusty-old blog gets a facelift!

My blog is back from the grave! After a rough 2010 that saw all of four posts, I've decided to rebuild this thing from scratch. It's running on an entirely new, home-brewed platform I've thrown together built on Amazon S3 storage. For those interested you can read the semi-technical overview (dead link) to learn how it works.

The goal in writing my own blog software was to create a tool that helped the writing process above all else. Right now the process for creating a new post looks like this:

• I open a new, blank text file on my computer.
• I write what I have to say.
• I click a big-ass "publish" button that syncs everything up.

Boom. Perfect. No logging-in, admins, users, categories, tagging, drafts, database updates or a million other possible distractions that have all made writing within the confines of a blog editor feels so unnatural. This new setup is much more streamlined. There's also the added benefit of how mobile it makes my data. Everything I've written is sitting in a folder on computer as a plain text file and could be immediately transferred to some other use with little to no tinkering.

That doesn't mean it's perfect. But that does make this blog the perfect project, or at least a better one than it previously was. It's keeping me interested on a multitude of levels now. When I'm suffering from writer's block, instead of just leaving the blog to wither on the vine, I can tinker with the code and try to improve the tool.

I've transferred some of my more popular posts that were still seeing traffic, but I'm looking forward to starting over with a relatively blank slate.

..and thus ends my obligatory "welcome to my blog...again" post.