July 06, 2014

To blog or not to blog

Carlos Cuéllar
Carlos Cuéllar @cuellarfr

Reading time: 1 min

Tags: blogs

In the last few weeks I felt like I needed to write again and update this blog. Oh yes, I know this sounds like a cheap new year’s resolution and I know I have written these exact same words before, but this time I want to take it a bit more seriously and I have some good reasons to do it.

First of all, I want to force myself to write in English. I have lived in the US for almost three years and I speak and write in English daily, at work and at home, but it’s not the same writing a few words in a chat window than writing a full weblog post.

Second, I consume a pretty big amount of information daily: news, blogs about sports, technology, design, web development and other nerdy stuff. It’s probably healthy to stop reading sometimes and join the party by writing something. I don’t think a lot of people is going to read this blog and, honestly, I don’t care. This is completely selfish, just about me feeling better. But if someone stops by and wants to say hello, you are more than welcome.

And also, updating the design of this site has forced me to use again some old tools that I haven’t used in years. I do some front-end dev at work, but we are a Rails shop so my workflow has evolved A LOT. Using Textpattern again was difficult, it felt like going back in time 10 years! I didn’t feel comfortable at all, but I found this little plugin (a real lifesaver) that allowed me to develop using flat files, so I could at least use Git and Sass within TXP. But this is probably the last time I update a Textpattern website. Don’t get me wrong, Textpattern is still a solid and flexible CMS that works for some people, but it just feels dated. Next time I might be migrating to Jekyll, Kirby or something similar. Sign of the times.