Welcome to my blog! I really didn’t think I’d have one again, but I’ve been getting the itch recently and it was a fun programming exercise.
I was particularly inspired to write again by Brent Simmons and his blog Inessential — I love his short, undecorated style. It takes the pressure off. I’m not an expert in very much, and I hope the tone here reflects that. I probably won’t write often (I feel like I don’t have all that much to say), but I wanted a place that was my own on the internet again. If I do write anything here, expect posts about programming, physics, and music with some family stuff thrown in.
About this Site
Part of the fun of blogging is coming up with a Rube Goldberg contraption for posting. To make this blog go, I wrote a blogging engine in Python. It is mostly a port of Marco Arment’s Second Crack static engine (hosted here). It uses Dropbox and inotify-tools in pretty much the same way as Second Crack to automate posting. I chose Python because I’m much more familiar with it these days (second only to Fortran) than PHP.
Putting the blog together was a fun weekend-long break from physics programming, and the engine is still rough around the edges. The styling needs some work, and I don’t have an RSS feed yet (Update 11/9/14: I now have an RSS feed here!). I don’t have archives yet or any kind of tagging, but they’ll come eventually. I don’t have any kind of commenting, either, and I doubt I will. These days Twitter (I’m @tomshafer) is mostly the rage.
This represents a (mostly) clean break for me. I’ve written before, but many of those posts represent the kind of writing I want to avoid. Martha and I have a lot of fun things coming in the next year or two and this seems like a good time to at least have the option of blogging. I might sneak a few old posts in at some point, but the future is the fun part.