Technology

I’ve been ignoring this site for a while. Time to get to the site updated and the workflow perfected so I can blog/journal and make the site useful again. I am moving the domains and the site hosting off of linode to CloudFlare. The migration was actually pretty easy since I already post everything to GitHub anyway. The site has gone through many hosting options and versions over the years. I was looking on archive.org earlier and the original site I started, ClubReading.com, was back in 1999. At least that’s the earliest record of the domain registration. I started the site originally because php was new and I wanted to learn the language, and since I and some friends enjoy reading, I figured I would build us a site to keep track of reading and reviews. Keep in mind this was before goodreads. ...

I have a new role at work. For many years I managed the application development teams, but with recent growth and shifts, I’ve moved to the Marketing and Communications team as an innovation architect. The new role has so many interesting opportunities to learn new skills. One thing I’ve been learning is video editing. Our Marketing team has one videographer. She out-sources a great deal of the filming and editing work, but with limited funds, she does as much as she can personally. ...

Wow. If you, like me, are a Sublime convert, and a Pelican blogger, then this wonderful plugin is a must. The plugin adds several Pelican commands to the command palette creating shortcuts for article creation and adding tags. The best, and for me, the most useful part is the tag insert feature. It pulls all the tags from the site content and makes an easy to search and use list. Enjoy!

Check out Maciej Cegłowski’s great talk from XOXO 2013. He is the creator behind Pinboard. it’s a fun and inspiring talk. Enjoy!

I really like the static version of the site. It’s so much easier to support and configure. I can tweak to my hearts content. Jekyll is a wonderful platform, and Octopress is a great framework on Jekyll. However, ruby isn’t my strength. I’ve fiddled with ruby in the past, but I don’t love it. It is a great language, just not for me. If I’m perfectly honest, I love perl. Perl was an early first love, and is still a terrific language, but the static site generators in perl are limited. I did take a look at Blosxom, but there isn’t a large number of active users. I did find one site with current posts built using Blosxom, so it’s still out there. ...

Jordan McCollum has a great post for writers introducing site analytics and what to look for. Web marketing is a strange combination of advertising, customer appeal, and raw magic. Tracking your blog: using the data: “What do I do with this information? Again, look for trends. What makes these posts your most popular? The subject? The tone? The search engine presence? Was it informative? Social? Fun? Funny? Personal? Then do that again! ...

Awesome awesomeness! Repetitive Tasks - Chart Porn Enjoy!