The Great Migration of 2016
It has been a long time since I've blogged for fun. A lot has changed and a lot has remained.
It is my goal to start writing more about what I'm up to, as much for an archive for my kids, family, and friends to read as it is to just flex the writing muscles. Most posts will continue on the nerdy theme as relates to computers and programming. However, I do plan to write up summaries about activities that involve the family and friends, for when nostalgia or curiosity about a time in life comes up.
Initially, though, I will start to write up a series of posts about how I'm consolidating as much as possible of my digital life into servers and services that I run, and using Emacs to interact with those services as much as possible.
Blog migration
I was a happy Wordpress user and developer when blogging first became a "thing". Cranking out plugins helped pay the bills out of college and blogging about technical things is ostensibly why I got a job at 2600Hz in 2010.
There are certainly ways to interact with Wordpress installations via Emacs but in the end, I wasn't happy with them and wanted something more streamlined. Through some series of events, I came across Nikola and appreciated the minimalist nature of the default installation, the ease with which I migrated existing posts from Wordpress, and the ability to manage posts using Emacs' org-mode, with which I've made a conscious effort to learn this year as well.
Git migration
Part of the appeal is that I can now put my posts, as they're static files, into version control. I've setup Gogs on my server and am transitioning my personal repos to it (and off of GitHub). I also have the full power of the command line (grep, awk, sed, etc) to work with my blog's corpus.
Going forward
I'm excited by the prospects of these (and other) changes. My goal has been to reduce the applications I use with regularity to two: Emacs and a browser. The more I can accomplish in Emacs, the less friction there is to me getting things done, which is part of why I'm so excited. Emacs is a tool that has gotten out of my way to the point that I don't even think about most keybindings I use. Emacs has become a natural extension of my thought process, and as long as my fingers can keep up with my mind, there's no impedance from my editor.
Hopefully this is the restart of my blog; no excuses aside from laziness now!