I'm a Failed Blogger

Blogging has long been my mortal enemy. In fact, I’ve had more blog reboots than blog posts during my battle. This one is #4, and this time I’m determined to make it work. I swear.

I wish I had a good excuse for not blogging more, but I won’t bother to tell you my dog ate my homework. I do plan on writing about agile practices, Ruby, Node.js and JavaScript, CoffeeScript, and maybe a little .NET. This blog’s reboot, in fact, was created with a Ruby blog engine called Toto.

Having rebooted my blog three times already, I did learn what I didn’t like, and I had a small set of requirements:

• I wanted something simple – not WordPress
• I wanted cheap (free?) hosting
• I wanted to be able to hack at it using languages I like
• I wanted to use tools I like, i.e., vim, git, etc.

Toto is a blog engine that bills itself as minimalistic, with a footprint of just 300 lines. It’s designed to work with Heroku, and that’s free. It’s written in Ruby, and I like Ruby. And finally since the content is created in Markdown text files, a vim plugin is all I need to create the posts. Seems to meet the criteria.

Toto also has an accompanying template to work with it, called Dorothy. After a quick fork of it, I had it running quickly, was able to customize it easily, and found several helpful blog posts about it on the web. I also found some resources to help make it pretty.

Source Code:

• Toto
• Dorothy
• My Fork of Dorothy
• Dodo - Another fork of Dorothy. I used some of the ideas

Helpful Blog Posts and Resources:

• http://fadeyev.net/2010/05/10/getting-started-with-toto
• The icon set I used
• Markdown Reference
• vim-markdown Plugin

Happy blogging!