At the beginning of the year, I made a New Year’s resolution to be more communicative with friends and family. Part of that was that I was going to update my blog. The blog engine I was using before was certainly functional, but it had a glaring flaw that it was written in php, which, if you know me at all, I simply despise. So I looked for something written in Ruby. I found Typo, which is easy to set up and is reasonably functional. But then I had to deal with something that anyone who’s done any kind of multi-lingual application work knows will come up: character encoding. Either my old blog posts wouldn’t show up, or if I tried to write a new one using non-ASCII characters, it would break everything. And frankly, I don’t feel like debugging other people’s code in my spare time, because that’s what I do in my day job.

So finally, I found Octopress. Wonderfully simple, it uses the best NoSQL database there is - the filesystem. All I have to do is create a file - I can put any kind of characters I want in it, 例えばこんな日本語のじ、Или эти русские слова, and it won’t break things. Also, since there is no database - the website you see is just a bunch of flat files - it’s nice and snappy. So now that I finally got this thing working, you should see a lot more content from me here. Should.