It’s fair to say I’m a fairly indifferent sort of blogger. I’m happy to contribute to other people’s blogs, send kudos where it counts, post flamebaits where the kindling is dry, correct the misspelling of ‘definitely’ wherever I see it. But when it comes to my own blog (or blag as the dude from xkcd.com is fond of mispronouncing it) I’m just bone-lazy.
It’s not that I don’t see the value in blogging – I do. It’s a great way to to keep people in the loop, share with the world your ideas, passions and pet aversions – and of course promote your “personal brand”. But a big part of me looks at the blogosphere and just goes.. meh.
Plus there’s the cutting remarks I get. I asked my youngest what he thought of the last version of “Daddy’s blog”.. “boring!” was the emphatic reply. Apparently there was too much Ruby and not enough Lego™.
Anyway, here we go again with a new blog – this time running on Mephisto. I quite like Mephisto – simple, neat, just works.. except when it doesn’t. I spent five hours on the weekend trying to get the latest version up and running using Passenger on Dreamhost. Grrr.. When I figure out what I did I’ll put it up a recipe for setting up the blogging engine, but I can’t honestly say what it was that got everything running. Passenger kept throwing up a “something went wrong starting the app, check your logs” kinda message – with nothing in the logs at all to clue me in. I tried every little weird trick I could think of (or Google for) and nothing worked. Running the Rails Dispatcher from the console worked fine, ditto for firing it up using dispatch.fcgi. It just didn’t make sense. In the end I gave up and went for a swim with the kids. When I got back the damn thing was working. Go figure. Lesson learned – when the code is giving me the creeps, time to get out and play.
Plans? More Lego.. and more Ruby. I’ll reinstate some of my earlier articles.. like the stuff that had the site peaking at over five unique visitors per day! Woot! I’ll look to sharing some of the resources I’ve collected over the years for the old Lego Mindstorms gear (pre NXT) – a lot of this stuff is starting to disappear from the ‘net so I’ll do my bit in archiving and preserving. I have a project on the bench to bring the two fabulous worlds of Lego and Ruby together, but it’s all very prototypical so no promises that anything will see the light of day. And I have some stuff on the junction of Agile Development and Lego – true dinks!
So let’s see how it goes. Basic criteria is keeping a four-year old amused, so I’m off to make monster trucks (where Lego meets Scrap Heap Challenge). Anything else is gravy.
Cheers gentle reader. We’ll talk later.
