December 22, 2017

Starting a new blog

Things have gotten a lot easier since the last time I rebooted my blog. Years ago when I used MovableType, blog-making involved many hours of work importing from other blogs, mucking around in MySQL, hacking changes into the Perl backend, and messing with .htaccess. This time, I’m starting fresh with the fantastic jekyll-now project for GitHub Pages, and I’m editing this using the prose.io authoring tool. I’m really impressed with how smoothly it all works.

Posting personal thoughts on the internet is pretty challenging for me—I often agonize over how to word a 140-character tweet. As somewhat of a perfectionist, it’s uncomfortable to put myself out there in a system that feels so permanent and widely accessible. I was grateful for the recent opportunity to write for the Firefox Nightly blog about the DevTools visual refresh—it stretched some very dormant muscles and it felt good to communicate about my work in a structured way. Some more writing about design may be fun, and I’ll probably talk about art, video games, and life in Portland. Once things get rolling, it’ll be nice to discuss the ideas I listed in my existing personal site.

My biggest rule for this blog is to keep posts short and imperfect so that I don’t go another many years without blogging. Let’s see what happens!