Biilmann Blog

Brand New Biilmann Blog

January 4, 2009

After a long time of blogging inactivity I gave my Blog a brand new motor as new-years gift. It remains to be seen if a new motor will help on actually making the blog go somewhere, but at least the new look and feel will be a fresh start.

While the old webpop based blog engine works just fine for general blogging needs, it just never was developed to solve my specific ones. No code highlighting was a bad disadvantage for example - just about everything I think about posting seems to have code in it these days.

I also came to dislike the web based editor for writing posts. I always work in a text editor, and wouldn’t dream of typing my posts directly into a webform or a javascript rich text monstrosity. And as I like being able to work on posts from different computers, I also missed something that would include something like version control. So I started looking for a simple lightweight Blog engine that would let me write posts directly in Vim, and handle versioning with git. After trying out various options I went with Matthias Georgi’s new simple ruby/git based blog engine called Shinmun.

I also felt like giving the old Blog a visual shakeup, though venturing out from my world of hidden codes and into the scary daylight of oh so visible design stuff always daunts me a bit. Helped by an arsenal guides about web typography, grid based designs and how to work around the fact that you just don’t have the capability of putting 3 colours together in a way that doesn’t look visually depressing, I finally managed to produce a new Blog design that I’m fairly satisfied with.

So now the blog is ready to roll, and I’m all out of excuses for not producing a steady stream of interesting posts.

Posted by Mathias Biilmann. Category: Blogging. Tags: blog, ruby, shinmun.

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