After over a year of silence, I'm blogging again! A lot has happened in the time I've been away, the most notable of which is probably the new look of the website. As you can see, I've abandoned my self-hosted WordPress blog in favor of a static blog hosted on Rackspace's Cloud Files. I did this for a number of reasons:

• Static HTML files load really fast over a CDN.
• Cheap VPS services generally don't have the best uptimes.
• The old WordPress blog had a 500 ms latency when loading it, probably because:
• WordPress is really easy to fill up with junky plugins that slow it down.

I also made the switch because:

• Dynamicly-generated sites are potentially less-secure than sites that are pre-generated and I don't want to have to keep a WordPress installation up to date.
• It's easy to complicate the configuration of WordPress/LAMP server to the point where an update breaks something and it's been so long since you've edited the configuration you don't even know where to start fixing it.
• I just don't like PHP.

On top of all those reasons, I wanted to simplify the posting process so I could focus more on writing content and less on formatting it and maintaining the blog's back-end. To do this, I started using Pelican, a static-site generator written in Python that many people use as a robust blogging platform (I'll write about it more in my next post). I then use some scripts included with Pelican to upload the content files to Cloud Files to serve it (I'll write more about this process later, too).

I'm still getting used to the new format and while I've spent many hours trying to ensure that old posts appear as they were meant to appear, the blog import process isn't perfect so you may still see some broken links here and there. For the most part, though, it works and I'm pretty happy with it.

Anyways, I hope you all enjoy the new look and functionality of this blog and I'm really excited to finally be posting again!