There are plenty of great books and tutorials for Rails, but I learn best by getting my hands dirty, so I decided to write my own blogging platform. For an experienced Rails programmer this could be done in a day or two. For someone like me who has dived in over his head, this took a few months of working an hour or two everyday before going to work. In the end I learned rails, but abandoned the blogging platform leaving it 80% complete.

While I didn’t end up finishing my blogging platform this project taught me a lot. One important thing I learned was to trust my instincts. And my instincts were telling me that Rails is too big for the task at hand. Sure, you could use Rails to create a wonderful blogging platform, but I wanted something simpler. Just as I was coming to this realization, I stumbled across Jekyll, “a blog-aware static site generator for Ruby”. The concept is simple:

There are many advantages to this way of doing things. For one thing, “baking” your weblog (i.e., generating static web pages instead of serving dynamic pages) results in better performance when visitor traffic spikes. Brent Simmons and Tim Bray recently made strong arguments in favor of baking, so I won’t repeat them here. Another advantage is that your blog is automatically backed up. At the very least there is one copy on your computer and another on your server. Moreover, because there’s always a local copy of your blog and because there are no databases to fiddle with, deploying to a new host is trivial. In contrast, moving a Wordpress or Moveable Type blog can be a pain. But even if you never plan on changing hosts, it’s nice to have your posts living in text files rather than hidden away in a database. Finally, if you want to make changes or add plugins, the Jekyll code is easy to wrap your head around.

The redesign is still a work in progress (I did mention I was an inveterate builder). I only have Macs and Linux computers at home, so testing on Internet Explorer is difficult. That said, I have IE 8 at work, so I can check the site there and then make my tweaks at home. It’s currently readable on IE 8, but not as pretty as it is on modern browsers. A while back I made a commitment to stop waisting my time on designing around the quirks of outdated browsers, but I’ll make a few small tweaks to improve rendering in IE 8.

Now with all this change out of the way I can start posting words and images again. After all, isn’t that what blogs are for?