Restart

7 days ago 1 comments

This site is now powered by Ruby on Rails. Yep, completely rewrote it in Ruby. I've ported all features and posts from the old site over and everything's working flawlessly now. In fact, I've added quite a lot new features, such as comments! Yes, you can now comment on every post!

Why move to Rails?

The old code base just got pretty messy and I've worked a lot with Ruby lately so it just looked like a nice opportunity. What gave it the final kick was that I accidentally made a mistake on the site's database which deleted quite some data.

Also, I wanted to get better at Rails and Ruby too.

I've heard from people that Rails ain't a good fit for blogs, but I personally don't think so. Rails is an amazing framework which can totally be used to write a blogging engine.

Goals

• Have similar URLs
  • At the beginning, I wanted to keep the exact same URLs, however, I quickly dropped that idea in favor of Rails' routing best practices. All old URLs are redirected, though.
• Fix bugs from the previous version of the site
• Add comments
• Use existing Markdown posts
  • I wanted to be able to just "import" my previous posts and keep writing in that format, no changes.
• Stay close to Rails' best practices
  • I wanted to create a "true" Rails site, utilizing as many of its features as possible.
• Make the site even faster
  • The previous site wasn't slow by any means, but I wanted to make it a little faster, which I really did!
• Use the same design
• Add a JSON API for (almost) all pages
  • Try appending .json to the current URL! API docs will come soon!
• Write much cleaner code

Open Source

I think about open source'ing this site's source code, but I'm not quite sure about that. We'll see.

What happened to the previous posts?

The previous posts are all imported, however, they are archived. This means that they don't show up on the site or in feeds, but are still there if you know the URL.

What comes next?

I'm not quite sure. I want to continue writing on this site, that's for sure, at least.

I want to write better, longer, more detailed posts in the future. Most of my previous posts were just really short without much content.

Welcome to my new homepage!

about 1 year ago 0 comments

Welcome to my new homepage! I completely re-made it from scratch. I think it's really cool! Not every feature is implemented yet, but I'm working on them!