Hi again

October 16, 2013

Hi again. I migrated my blog from Tumblr to Octopress.

This is now about the 5th iteration of the blog. I think it went like this: Movable Type (several designs) > Tumblr > Octopress. I’ve preserved and migrated content each time.

I started writing this English site in 2005, thus about 8 years ago. This was a time before Facebook, Twitter or any other such social media. I thus had a lot of content in my ealier years that did not have lasting value.

So, when now migrating my site over yet again, I went beyond just making sure the cosmetics of the posts were correct. I fully edited the site, removing a lot of content without lasting value, but also fixing some links and adding modern commentary where appropraite. It was tedious and took many nights, but the result now accurately represents how I want to appear on the Internet.

There’s no more comments feature. If you need to reach me, use one of the methods shown in the footer of this site. I’ll be happy to update my posts, I’ve done so many times to fix typos or errors.

What’s the point of this blog? Is it about the writer (me) or reader (you)? I think it will continue to be a mix of both. I don’t post too much about my private life, though I do have the occasional travelogue. There’s some political commentary, but mostly, it’s about technology. Among other things, Octopress is more hacker-friendly and makes it much easier to post code examples, Gists from github etc. I’m not sure if I’ll actually end up posting more, but now at least I have a better set of tools.

Why get away from Tumblr in the first place? It continues to be a great hosted service. I just ended up at a point where I really want to own all my data in its source form, and self-hosting is the best way for that. To their credit, Tumblr has a great API that also made it easy to execute the migration. I did not find any readymade migration scripts, so I ended up writing my own.