You’re here! That means I’ve managed to convert my site (back) over to WordPress. In the interest of making progress, I had to cut some corners. Currently, that manifests itself as taking my old weblogs Man vs. Machine and Punchline Labs offline while I figure out how to rejigger the content into WordPress.

Don’t stop reading! This isn’t “Yet Another Boy-Have-I-Been-Busy But Now I Promise To Post More” post!

The decision to switch (back) to WordPress is bittersweet. I’d originally switched away to Typo, but that didn’t work out well. On the one hand, Typo went a little sideways, requiring me to poke the database a little before I could post. On the other hand, running a big Rails app like Typo on shared hosting like TextDrive isn’t a recipe for reliability. So a change was necessary.

Point: you’re cooler if you write your own weblog software. Its been pointed out that Jedi build their own lightsabers and thus, so should programmers. I think it’s a wonderful idea and I subscribe to it where I can. However, it’s an idea at one end of a spectrum of pragmatism and I need to live at the other end.

Counter-point: the writing is more important than the gizmos. To a point, writing my own weblog software is yak shaving. In fact, I’ve contemplated switching weblogs, hosts and a myriad of other choices for month. Thus, with a cleanly shorn yak and nothing to show for it, I finally jumped in the pool and switched. And now, I can write. Awesome!

The writing here is the most important thing. Not so much whether I’ve got Ruby cred because I run a Ruby-powered weblog, web cred because I skipped using widgets to pull in some content rather than hacking it in (I went with widgets) or design cred because I built my own theme. Very few people will come back on those strengths alone. Its the writing stupid! Thus, I’m re-aligning development choices based on removing friction from writing.

I think I made a reasonable choice going with WordPress and hacking DePo Clean. In the end, I just want something that lets me write whatever and whenever I want with as little friction as possible. WordPress fits that maxim. Plus I think Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the Automattic team have pretty good taste, and I can get behind that.

So, what have we learned?

See, I told you this wasn’t one of those posts where I apologize for not posting for many months and then promise to post more frequently. Though with my luck, I won’t post again for three weeks ;)