I used to have a Blogger Hoodie.
Way back when, I was very into blogging. I loved Blogger and then Livejournal. My friends all blogged and it was a great way to stay in-touch and up-to-date with what my friends were up to. Then MySpace came along and we had another way to see what our friends were up to. Now, with Facebook and Twitter (and things like LinkedIn), it’s much easier to keep up-to-date with not only friends, but business acquaintances or industry leaders / celebrities.
At some point, I stopped blogging. I moved to twitter and facebook. Other services like gmail, friendfeed, and more all help as well, so I don’t have the same need to follow friends’ blogs (or write my own) that I once had.
So … What about blogging?
Over the past year or 2, as I’ve gotten more and more into software development. I’ve met more and more people with technical blogs. I’ll ask a friend “how do I get mysql working on OSX?” and he’ll direct me to an entry on his blog explaining howto do it. I decided that I needed my own blog to share code, bugfixes, ideas, etc with the world.
So, I started looking at blogging engines. As a Ruby developer, naturally I wanted to find a blogging engine built in Ruby, but I didn’t have a great deal of luck. I played with Wordpress for awhile, but I didn’t enjoy the syntax whenever I wanted to hack the template or plugins. I started designing my own file-based blogging engine based on simple markdown files and a directory structure. That’s when fellow OpenRain hacker, Marc Chung, showed me Jekyll.