Let’s start with a story.

A long time ago (1 year 3 months ago to be exact), some dude registered a personal domain and set up a site with Blogger. He did this for two reasons: he didn’t have a personal site, and he wanted a place to practice writing. He then wrote two technical, dry posts about using Amazon Web Services to mine Litecoins, and never posted anything again.

Let’s go to the present. That dude (who was clearly me) wants to restart that blog. I’ve got things I want to say, and although Facebook statuses are okay, they don’t have formatting and they’re harder to find in the future.

If that was the only consideration, I could have used Facebook Notes, but I’ve also been looking for an opportunity to update my personal site. After looking around a bit, I’ve settled on using Jekyll and Github Pages. I chose them because:

  • Blogger is a heavyweight editor that hides lots of formatting behind abstraction. That was good then, but now I want something cleaner. With Jekyll, it’s much easier to see how my site is generated. There’s no WYSIWYG editor, but I can read unrendered Markdown well enough.
  • With Github Pages, I don’t need to worry about paying for web hosting.
  • The site is backed by a git repo I get backups for free. I get branches for free. I get edit history for free. I can literally go through my commits and get insights into my writing process. This is what sold me on Jekyll; having complete draft history is beautiful for retrospectives on writing. To be honest, I suspect I’ll never use it, but it’s good to have the option.

In short, Jekyll lets me write blog posts with little overhead and great transparency. Over the past few days, I’ve set up the current site and ported over content from the the old one. You should see the old blog posts if you scroll down. Out with the old, in with the new…

As for next steps, I’m going to try to keep this reasonably updated. That means not all posts will be technical - I don’t have that much material. It’ll be a personal blog, and I’ll post whatever I feel like writing about. So far, I have two posts in the works. One involves reviewing fanfiction, and the other involves a webcomic. They should be going up shortly. There may be a third about biased and unbiased coins, but that one will come out later.

As for the title - although I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, one of my goals is to be an interesting, insightful person. Unfortunately, I’m not one yet. But if I try, maybe I can get there.