Happy New Year

31 December, 2014

A new website for the new year

Until this morning, my site was running on the very excellent Squarespace platform. This afternoon, it’s a brand new, stripped-down site running (for free!) on Heroku.

I had a whole lot of photos and blog posts, but wasn’t doing anything interesting with the site. The site was serving as a design portfolio, a blog, a photographic portfolio, a contact form and a whole lot of other mess. It was a nightmare to navigate and it wasn’t a good representation of anything much. I was bored with it.

Update!

No! Not Heroku any more!

Huh

This new site is going to be a lot less ‘precious.’ I’m going to try things. I’m going to break things. I’m going to post things, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Anyway, there are better communities in which to share photos and design portfolios than on my own, isolated, site.

But why

I’m using this as a chance to learn more about linux and node.js, with a possible end goal of running the whole site on a Raspberry Pi. I’m not sure if I will or not (EDIT: I totally did it!), but I’d like to keep the option open. In the pursuit of minimal overhead, I’m currently running Casey Liss’s open source Camel engine to run the site. It’s simple enough that I can understand most of it, and I’m looking forward to hacking it into something else. Or using as-is — so far it’s pretty good.

Because it’s free and seemed like a good service/paradigm to learn about, I’m (no longer!) serving this site through Heroku.

Cool

Cheers!