First Post

Here I am again with another attempt at blogging. After dallying with solutions from external providers, I’m back with a self-hosted solution on my own domain, just like I had when I first started a blog many years ago - only then it was Wordpress and now it is a static site generated using Pelican.

I think the static site approach suits my workflow better. Plus I really like the approach of writing posts in a very lightweight fashion using Markdown. My last attempt at blogging, with Silvrback, also used Markdown, but I found the theming inflexible and it didn’t prove to be a great platform for writing posts about coding, which is one of the main things I want to do here. With a static site generator I’ll have a lot more control over what the site looks like.

Of course, the main limiting factor governing the success or otherwise of this blog will be time. As a quick way of getting started, I’m going to reblog some Silvrback posts from last year on programming with open data and the Internet of Things, taking the opportunity to update them a bit while I’m at it.