Over the last few weeks I’ve finally created (and “shipped”) my own site. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but kept putting it off for the “right time”. Well, the “right time” finally came, so to speak, and I realised that the absence of a personal site / blog was causing more harm than any perceived “good” that might come from waiting until I was more ready, or had a larger backlog of posts to launch with. I love writing, and I’ve let more than a few burning issues or cool ideas fall from my mind unspoken due to lack of a personal site, and an unwillingness to create one in a half-hearted fashion.

So it’s with gladness and just a little sense of achievement that I can finally look at my own site, and honestly say that it is at least three-quarter-hearted!

I’m also pretty happy with the technology underpinning the site. I decided to go with Octopress after reading some pretty positive things around the interwebs, and deploy it to Heroku. Heroku is awesome! This site is my first experience with it, so I’m singing its praises after only a fairly limited use-case, but nevertheless…

Octopress has also been pretty good. I’ve played around a bit with customising it, as I wanted to use a Bootstrap theme (particularly, Superhero Bootswatch). For the short term I’ve just manually replaced the layouts with Bootstrap-centric ones, but I’d like to move towards actually customising the SASS styles when I get a chance.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about this whole process has been working with and learning new technologies and frameworks. It’s a refreshing change from my professional day-to-day. It’s also a much nicer experience seamlessly jumping between my Windows desktop and Macbook. Well the Windows seams are at least fairly small and non-intrusive.

I’ll write a bit more on the process of going from nothing to a Bootstrap-themed Octopress site running on Heroku at some stage over the next few days, but for the time being this intro post at least makes the site look a little less bare. Oh, and to offset the lack of posts, I’ve also put up some short stories I’ve written!