This is me attempting to resurrect my blog after several years of silence. This has also given me a chance to redesign things and adopt another static site generator.

Octopress served me well, but I felt like it was difficult to grasp the fundamentals and hard to pick up after a while away. I went looking for new site framework and found Middleman. I liked that it was written in Ruby and I really liked the tutorials I found for it.

In particular, Julie Pagano’s fantastic tutorial was invaluable in getting me past a bunch of unexpected things.

The plugins I am using are:

• middleman-blog for support of the article format
• middleman-gh-pages for an easy GitHub pages integrated workflow
• middleman-syntax for syntax highlighting of code snippets

Starting from a blank Gemfile, unfortunately, seemed to not give properly rendered code syntax blocks.

An unmerged PR appears to address the problem, but I found that using Julie Pagano’s Gemfile.lock also worked very well. I am very grateful that it was available.

The rest of the work was about adapting my strange icon color scheme into something that doesn’t repulse and offend. Mixed results, I would say.

Now that this is set up, I have high hopes to use this new system to write more about technology and my experiences with it.

The code for this site now resides on GitHub