Hello, world!

This is my first post on the new zigg.com powered by Felix Felicis.

How I got here is a bit of a story. I once was a rather prolific writer (though of questionable quality) on places like N-Sider and my own Blogger-powered journal. In those days, Blogger provided the option to publish directly to my own hosted space instead of using their servers. Alas, they claimed it was all very unreliable (even when using SFTP, which to this day I'm not totally sure I believe) and shut it down unless you wanted to use their hosting. So I left what I had and closed up shop.

But the urge to write never really went away; it was just sort of buried. In the meantime, more and more people embraced writing in the cloud, be it crampedly on Twitter or in style at the lovely Medium. I still tweet, but despite a few experimental pieces at Medium (and even after experiencing their really nice feedback system), I remained uncomfortable with this whole notion that I didn't own the space my words lived in. These feelings really got fired up when I was looking at republishing "Permanence" there; rereading it made me question what the heck I was doing. Felt like a hypocrite.

Finally, I wanted to post things that weren't quite so… heavy. Medium didn't feel like the appropriate place to expound on a neat thing I did in Ansible the other day. So I opted to check out static site generators, found Felix Felicis, found it nice and simple and pretty close to what I was looking for, and Skeleton helped me save my CSS sanity (to a point). I still have to stifle the urge to throw it all away and build my own—something I swore I'd do for years—but I think it'll do nicely. Time will tell, and in the meantime, everything's all nice and Marked-down so if I ever do get that burst of energy and redo it all, I won't have to worry overmuch about content migration.

So, now I have a place to write again. I'm excited! I'm very much looking forward to letting everyone back into the weird world of me again. I'm planning on migrating old content as time permits; some is already here, though my old journal in particular is going to be a bigger job. Thanks for reading, and thanks for waiting.

(oh who am I kidding nobody was actually waiting for me)