So I’ve ditched the old blog and started anew.

There were a few reasons for this: firstly, I wasn’t terribly happy with my ‘new’ WordPress theme. It wasn’t totally terrible, but it still had rough edges design-wise, still wasn’t great for posting code, and still needed a lot more work to make it play nicely on mobile. These were all things I could fix, but why should I? I want to spend my time writing about stuff, not fixing my blog engine. That is why I’m blogging, after all.

Secondly, I didn’t really like working with WordPress that much. I can see how super-convenient it would be for a traditional blog, but my needs were quite different, and I felt myself having to work against WP’s architecture rather than with it. Maybe I could have spent more time reading up on PHP and WordPress development in particular, but they just aren’t technologies that I’m really prioritizing learning about right now. Never say never, though.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I really like Octopress. The simplicity of a static site; the quality of the default templates; the breeziness of markdown, liquid and Yaml; and the natural integration of programmer-specific features (the Solarized code highlighting); it all sold it for me. Plus, if I ever do want to tinker with my blog engine, I’d probably rather learn Ruby than PHP.

Of course, now I’ve sorted out the blog, I don’t have any excuses for not posting. So I’d better get cracking, hadn’t I?