Garbled

This will be my final post on this blog, but that’s not as dramatic as it seems. I’ve been setting up a WordPress install over at http://garbled.benhamill.com/ and moving all the posts over there. I’m still messing with CSS to make it look right, but that’ll just be a little while. If you like, you can go ahead and subscribe to the feed over there. After this post, all new posts will go into WordPress.

In a couple of months, I’ll make it so that http://blog.benhamill.com/ points at the WordPress install, too, which will probably break your feed if you’re subscribed to this one. So, go ahead and change your feed or bookmark or whatever. The first new post on the new engine will be about the ruby gem I just released about 20 minutes ago.

Currently, this blog runs on a great Rails-based blog engine called Enki. I initially installed it here because I liked the idea of hacking on the engine a bit or looking under the hood as a learning experience. And it was educational, at first, but more and more, I find that I don’t really want to mess with it. I’d rather the blog Just Work.

I’m thinking I might look at installing WordPress and running Garbled that way. I’m not sure how it’ll go, exactly, and it feels a little dirty, being php and all. But, really, blog software isn’t something I really have a big interest in. I suspect that the WordPress code base might not be as awesome as I’d like, but, honestly, I won’t have to look at it and it has a lot of neat features that I’ve gotten used to on the other blog that I write at.

However, the real driving factor is in the idea that WordPress is so widely used and stable. Comments have been broken here for a while and I’ve been too busy, distracted and/or lazy to track down why. In fact, as I was writing this, @jcsaltergo discovered that I was having some kind of Passenger issue. Then it vanished. I don’t really relish tracking it down.

I’m hoping that I can make the URL for the feed stay the same, but in case I can’t, consider this fair warning, that you might have to resubscribe when it breaks. Similarly, I’ll have to see what the best way to port all the posts is. I’m suspecting the copy/paste will win for simplicity.

For those of you who thought my last post (about role playing) was interesting, I have some news: I won’t be posting about that stuff here. I will, however, be writing on the topic. My friend, Stewart, and I realized the he and I would have a lot of fun writing together on a blog specifically about role playing. So if you are interested in our thoughts on that topic, we’ve called it Maximizing Rockmost. We’ve started off with several posts (some of which are expansions of material from my post here) so you can see what sort of thing we’re likely to be writing about. I’m looking forward to it.

For those of you who wonder why I’m blathering about RPGs and wish I’d get back onto a technical topic, don’t worry. I’m presenting at Austin on Rails this month about git (along with Mike Subelsky of OtherInbox). I plan on blogging about that presentation. I also want to write about vim and about ruby koans and about making my first ruby gem. So there’s technical topics in the pipeline. Never fear.

You read my blog, right? I mean—here you are reading it. I’ve been having an internal debate for a while about something, wondering what people who read my blog would think. Then I realized there’s a wonderful way to find out: ask.

So far, Garbled has been mostly about programming stuff. I also do a fair amount of table-top role playing and since I started blogging, some of my ideas on that topic have ended up sounding like they might be worth a blog post. But I don’t really have a role playing blog. In considering whether to post about both topics on Garbled, I’ve got two conflicting things going on:

1. People say you should pick a topic and stick to it if you want to build readership. By this advice, I should talk only about programming here and find another place to post role playing thoughts.
2. My thinking about programming and about role playing happen in adjacent or overlapping regions of my mind, so, to me, they are somewhat complimentary. I sort of feel like seeing both those lines of thought paints a (more) complete picture of me as a person.

So what are your thoughts? Would a rare or uncommon post about role playing in general or maybe GURPS in specific be alright? Considering that it would mostly probably be about plot construction and other GM related activities. Or should I stick to programming and programming-adjacent topics? Let me know in the comments.

Well, I finally got this thing working. Don’t book mark it yet, I plan on changing the URL over, but have to deal with registration transfer, etc. and don’t feel like mucking with that yet. Please, if you like, comment on the aesthetics or if you notice anything doesn’t work.

I’ve got the source code for this blog up on GitHub, which you can check out if you like. I’m sure people will say that I’ve got some stuff in source control that I shouldn’t. If you post something like that in the comments, I’ll at least have a look at it and consider. Deploying’s a pain if you leave important stuff out of version control, no?