After a bit of thought, I’ve decided to move the site away from Open Melody. I’m still a big fan of the software, and I wish the project the best of luck, but I’ve come to realise that it’s not a good fit for what I want to do. If you have several blogs, many users, and need a web interface and dynamic features like comments and trackbacks, then Melody (and it’s predecessor, Movable Type) are a good choice. However, I have a single blog, a single user, and I want to keep everything static so that any fleeting spike in traffic won’t bring the whole thing grinding to a halt. Moreover, I prefer things where I can get at them, in the file system; that way, I can use all the filters and editors and version control systems that I’m familiar with.

This last point is what crystallised the decision for me. I’ve increasingly been finding myself getting bogged down in details whilst trying to make changes to the site’s design or functionality. Melody is justifiably a complex system, as it does a lot. There are large parts of it I don’t understand. I’m sure I could learn it, but the fact that I keep fighting the tide suggests that I’d be learning things weren’t necessary for what I actually want to achieve. So, I’ve decided to move to something simpler and better suited to my needs.

The tool I’ve chosen is Jekyll. It’s small and simple enough for me to understand completely (having to learn Ruby is an added bonus), it keeps everything in files which I can edit with Emacs and track with Git, and it has an importer that brings the posts in from Melody with a minimum of fuss. So, the site looks more or less the same, but the back end is a lot more straightforward and it should make it easier to improve things in the future.

I for one welcome our new text file overlords.

When I started the new-look blog, I was aiming to update at least once per week. A cursory glance at the timeline will tell you that, for the last few weeks, I haven’t managed it. I do have an excuse, however - the hard drive in my laptop died a sudden and inexplicable death. I’ve actually been quite lucky in this respect - in the twelve or so years that I’ve had a computer with a hard drive, I’ve only had one other fail on me, which I believe works out at well below the failure rate you’d expect for consumer hard disks - but it’s still a bit inconvenient. While I do have other devices that I could in theory use, you really need a proper, decent-sized keyboard if you’re composing text of any length. That eliminates everything but the desktop PC, which would’ve meant sequestering myself away upstairs instead of being sat on the sofa, still connected to other people. Well, at least it gave me a chance to read more, and get marginally less bad at the guitar.

In any case, I’ve now got and installed a new hard drive (at 320GB and 7200rpm, it’s substantially better than the 80GB/5400rpm one it replaces). Fortunately, I finally caved in and upgraded to OS X 10.5 a few months ago, so relatively recent Time Machine backups meant bringing everything back was a piece of cake.

Now I just need to think of something to write. Damn.

After bashing out a little HTML and CSS, and tweaking Apache config files a bit, www.rho.org.uk has a new front page, which points (amongst other places) here, so this site it now visible to the outside world. I’ve also created an archive of the previous (Blosxom-based) site on the off chance it’s of any use to anyone.

Now all I have to do is write some blog entries about something less tedious than configuring blogging software. Hmm…

Just finished tinkering with the look of the new blog; currently, I’ve settled on the standard “Minimalist White” with a custom header background. No doubt it’ll evolve as time goes on, but I’m happy with it for now. For what it’s worth, the Movable Type Design Assistant proved very useful in trying out ideas. I was less impressed with the way MT itself kept throwing away my changes to the stylesheet when I hit “save”, but that seemed to stop once I turned of syntax highlighting. C’est la vie.

I’ve also added an initial bio page here; it’s not complete yet, but at least it’s more up-to-date than my last one.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to http://www.rho.org.uk (which is, to a first approximation, no-one) will have noticed that I’ve not updated it for over a year and a half. The short answer is lethargy; I just didn’t get round to it. For the long answer, read on. Previously, http://www.rho.org.uk was a single site running on Blosxom. In order to get the site looking how I want it to, I’d written a number of templates. And plugins. And hacked the script a bit. It all sort of worked, I enjoyed doing it, and I even appreciated the Perl practice. However, I decided to rearrange things such that entries were organised by date as opposed to category (see Cool URIs don’t change), and that’s when the problems started.

In theory, this shouldn’t be too difficult - Blosxom is, after all, a very flexible system, and can do this sort of thing - but to sort out all the details, and to make all my plugins and templates work in the new world, isn’t a ten-minute job. The effect was that every time I felt like writing some actual content for the site, I’d pick up the computer, and think “I need to sort out the script first”. I’d prod at it listlessly for half an hour, but without enthusiasm. After all, that wasn’t what I’d picked up the computer to do. I’d lose interest, and go and do something else. Last week, instead of starting to tweak the script, I checked the public version of the site. The last entry was from eighteen months ago.

I could have knuckled down, dived in, mixed metaphors and fixed the existing setup. However, that sounds a lot like hard work. What’s more, the problems probably wouldn’t stop there - the more I go off-piste with Blosxom, the bigger a rod I create for my own back. I realised that rho.org.uk is something I do for fun, and that what I really wanted was something that worked with the minimum of fuss. I’ve tried the DIY route, and I know I can do it. That doesn’t mean I want to. I want to be writing entries, not messing with Perl and Apache.

So, I decided to start from a clean slate. I’ll keep the old site around as an archive, but I’m not bothering to port the older entries en masse. I’m also separating my blog - (http://rob.rho.org.uk) from the main website (http://www.rho.org.uk), as that gives me more flexibility for any future changes, and means I don’t need to shoehorn pages that don’t make sense (such as the one for SilverService) in to a blog structure. Software-wise, I’m using Movable Type - I’ll post more about that later.

I also promise to post more frequently. Honest.