Same old blogger, brand new platform.
Those who have known me for awhile know that I enjoy tinkering, sharing what I learn, and writing. Since 2014 I have maintained a personal blog, though I fell off from updating it in 2018. Why? It started as another tinkering project. I claimed digital squatters rights on domain names using my last name and I wanted to experiment with running a web server on my long-outdated 2007 Dell XPS laptop. I chose to use the now-defunct Octopress blogging platform, which was an interesting and fun Ruby-based platform forked off of Jekyll.
Even as Octopress creator, Brandon Mathis, acknowledged the platform's shortcomings and pulled support for it, I soldiered on and migrated the blog from the Dell to a Digital Ocean host. Looking back, it's amusing to see how many posts were along the lines of "Apple updated its built-in Ruby environment and now Octopress is broken again." Every time I would get inspired to write, launch terminal, and fire off a bundle exec rake new_post["title"] command, Octopress would break again. I should state that while I'm curious and better with computers than many, I'm not a programmer. The learning opportunities from this were always fun, but never worth it. Invariably, I would lose steam and walk away. In the meantime, along comes another update, ensuring my Sisyphean task would continue...
... until now. I'm on to new ideas, new projects, and new ways to tinker. I want to focus on what I have to share more than the technology with which to share it. To that end, I have switched over to Wix, which offers a well-maintained and easy-to-use blogging platform. While I've lost a lot of the granular control I had with Octopress, I also don't have to spend so much damned time fiddling with it. I will likely migrate some of the more interesting articles I wrote on the OG vertner.net over time. While I appreciate the successes I earned in the process of building and maintaining my old blog, I'm also proud of all of the failures which have provided me with so many Lessons Learned!