You can see my last post is about bringing the blog back, which I did, in part. But I never published it publicly, because I got caught up in deployment adventures.

It's not hard to set up a staticfile blog these days. There are tools and hosting services aplenty. But I wanted to use Pelican because it's based in Python, which I love. (I wouldn't be hacking the code base; why would the language selection matter?)

Anyhow, the entire site got held up in "I'm too damned busy" land, with entirely legit excuses ranging from:

• I'm the COO/VPE of Appsembler
• I have young kids and being an involved and responsible father is one of my core principles
• COVID

The site has been in the back of my mind, though. With a bunch of blog posts half-drafted, it's time to let them out.

Platforms, round N

Yes, I thought about Substack, which my friend Alex uses (go subscribe if you're interested in data!), but I tend not to focus my posts on a single theme.

And I've played around with getting one of my Synology NAS boxes or Raspberry Pis set up as a host, but proper, secure network config was another "I'll get it sorted one of these days" TODO item.

So I'm using Github pages.

Historical posts

I have a bunch of older posts, dating back to 1999, when I first hung out my blog's shingle. They'll make it over here eventually (yet another false blocker I put in the way of bringing the site back), as I'm able to convert them to Markdown and get them processed.

Interesting tidbits

• I'm using iA Writer for writing these days. I'd used Byword and Evernote for years, but needed something with better organization than Byword, and better true Markdown support than Evernote.
• We've been playing with self-hosted Metabase a lot more at work recently. It's like Apache Superset, but a heck of lot easier to use, esp for non-data-scientists, non-engineers. It's fun to use and people have built some fantastic dashboards.