blog/content/a-fresh-start.md

Title: A fresh start Date: 2017-06-04 Modified: 2017-06-05 Category: Blog Slug: a-fresh-start Tags: announcement Summary: A new beginning for this place - well overdue!

As you might have noticed, things look a bit different around here. Things are cleaner, simpler, smaller and just plain better. This change, long overdue, is something I decided to do instead of my actual work, because among my many other flaws, I am also a procrastinator without peer. So, welcome to the new retro-freedom.nz!

I made these changes for several reasons, which I will endeavour to describe below, to the best of my ability.

The old setup was too magical

I don't like Ruby. I don't like how it runs, how it's designed, and in general. I used Octopress before, because when I just got into it, it was recommended to me as an easy place to start. At the time, given how little I knew, it probably was - however, now that I'm older and wiser, it looks like a crufty, unmaintainable, magical mess, which I neither understand nor can (or want to) hack on.

It sticks JavaScript into my pages whose purpose I do not know or understand. It relies on a bunch of things to generate pages whose innards are completely unknown to me and don't make any sense. It requires a bunch of things to properly work which I have no desire to learn. It needs a full JavaScript engine to even generate anything! On top of all that, it's an old version, and every time I've asked anyone seemingly-related to that project how to migrate, I got met with a wall of silence.

Needless to say, the current solution is much cleaner, much less magical and generally makes a whole lot more sense.

The old content no longer reflects who I am

I drank the GNU/FSF Kool-Aid hard. This certainly reflected itself in what I posted; at the time, it made sense. Now, being a bit more aware of certain basic realities of the world, and my stance on them, I no longer identify with this kind of thinking for the most part. Furthermore, my old content was, for lack of a better word, rather juvenile. While it certainly was fun to make (in places), I don't think this is what I want to be associated with anymore. Furthermore, this is not the kind of thing I want there to be more of in the world today.

The setup I had discouraged me from writing

Due to the ugliness of the whole setup I was running, I found I almost never blogged at all. This runs totally counter to the point of having a blog as such. Thus, anything which makes it easier for me to blog is something I should embrace, and this new set-up seems to do just that.

So in short, things are a-changed around here. Hopefully, I'll be able to start putting up my thoughts and discoveries soon enough. That being said, if you liked my old angry, ranty self, you'll still get some of that, just in a very different form, targeted at very different things. Hopefully that'll still be fun - just differently fun.