I finally got fed up with the fact that the post dates were wrong (you know, for the 3, pointless entries that were even here.) I also realized that I have no desire to try to wedge my content into that stupid, liquid templates system. It might be useful when you want non-programmers to edit a site’s layout, but it’s too limiting when I could just use plain-old Ruby code.

So, I gave toto the boot and am hand-rolling something simple. Yes, I know there are a few other weblog tools out there that would give me the simplicity of editing locally in vim using a markdown-formatted file, but I guess I’m suffering from a bit of not-invented-here at this point after trying a couple and finding them severely flawed when it comes to the way I want to work with them.

Frankly, I also needed an outlet for hacking on something that didn’t have to be useful to anyone other than myself. The amount of time I’ve been able to spend just writing code had decreased substantially since I took on management of the ProjectDX team at the beginning of the year.

Now that posting isn’t a complete pain in the rear and the dates will show up correctly, I’m hoping I might actually bother to write a blog post once in a while. Based on historical evidence, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

For whatever reason, the combination of Toto, Heroku and/or my implementation seems to cause every post here to have it’s post-date updated to something approximating the current date. Given that I haven’t exactly been creating a lot of content on this site lately (and lost years worth of posts not too long ago), I hadn’t noticed this problem until the other day. To be honest, I’m not sure if I really feel like putting forth the effort to fix it given everything else going on in my life these days.

Part of me wonders why I keep this site up and running at all. I tend to make public statements in 140-character increments these days. Twitter has killed the casual blog.

The big news in my life right now is that the company I work for just went through a merger, so TSSI is no more, and ProjectDX is now part of Renewable Funding. I decided to accept the offer presented by the new owners–and it came with a bit of a promotion–so I am now Software Development Manager and responsible for guiding and growing the Portland development team.

Hello, World! (?)

I’ve had the decision to completely restart my website made for me. The previous incarnation of my site was being generated via a post-commit hook in a git repository that lived on a VM at Slicehost. I decided to shut down that VM and move the website to a system that I didn’t have to maintain. Unfortunately, I thought that I had the git repository mirrored on my GitHub account, but apparently not. I’m sure I could come up with usable backups if I put forth enough effort, but let’s be honest: thanks largely to Twitter, I had barely updated the site in the last 2 years, and a lot of what was there was either outdated or of no real value to anyone other than myself.

So here we go again. This time around, I’m just using GitHub’s pages feature to publish the site. I don’t have to maintain the server, and now I know that the repository is on my GitHub account.

UPDATE I’m actually switching to using toto with Heroku. I like toto better than jekyll, because I don’t have to put up with using the Liquid page templating engine. Plain-old ERB FTW!

I facilitated my second release retrospective with the ProjectDX team yesterday. The first, back in October, went well enough given that I was asked to facilitate at the start of the retrospective and had no time to prepare; but yesterday’s retrospective went great since I knew ahead of time that I would be facilitating.

Wow! Just…wow!

I can’t believe 2008 is already over. The older I get, the faster the years seem to fly by; I’m not sure I like the trend. The effect mainly tells me that I need to concentrate more on living my life intentionally, so that I have a better memory of my everyday experiences.

If you’re seeing this, then you see that I’ve stopped hosting my blog on Blogger and am now using a slightly modified Jekyll. Jekyll is the engine that powers GitHub’s recently announced “pages” feature.

I’m not hosting on GitHub, though. I simply installed Jekyll on the cheapest VPS from Slicehost, set up a git repository on that server to hold the contents of the site and then slapped together a simple post-update hook script for git that automatically publishes the site when I commit changes.

The changes also come with a new design.

Dragons are cool, so I am cool.

The stylesheets obviously aren’t fleshed out yet, so everything pretty much looks like crap. I plan to have it fixed up real soon.

Also need to slap together a new Atom feed for the posts.

All worth it, since I can now easily compose my posts in Vim using markdown syntax and have them stay editable in that format. Maybe now I’ll actually post more than once every couple of months. :-)

Well, it didn’t take me long to decide that stand-up was the way to go. On Saturday, I ordered the Ergotron LX Wall Mount System from Amazon and made good use of my Amazon Prime membership to get it delivered this afternoon. I think it got delivered around 2 PM and—several hours later—I’ve got it installed and have my new workstation ready to go:

I’ve succumbed to the influence of all the cool kids on the block and decided to try out this “stand-up desk” thing.

Before committing to any purchases, I figured it would be a good idea to see if I’d be able to—ahem—stand it at all, so right now I’m using a makeshift stand-up desk consisting of putting my monitor on top of my stereo and a couple of books and my keyboard and trackball are sitting on top of a big box and (the keyboard at least) is also in top of some books.