Got Yak?

Here's my obligatory Hello World post.

I had some Blogger blogs a decade ago that are probably full of embarrassing garbage at this point and I should just delete them.

I had a pretty good professional blog on my prior employer's website , but that's prior and it looks like my blog there has disappeared from the Web. Fair enough.

So I want to have my own blog.

I wanted to launch with a non-default blog theme (something with light text on a dark background, maybe solarized). With a good for-print alternative CSS, of course, in case somehow you'd want to print any of this.

What I really wanted to do is write my own Ghost theme, because I've realized that I have vastly less HTML, CSS, and JavaScript expertise than the modern polyglot programmer really needs to be effective, and besides I'm sure none of the available Ghost themes, certainly not the free-as-in-cheapness ones, have precisely my design sensibilities. Or at least precisely the design sensibilities I'd like to have once I develop them.

Well, actually, what I really really wanted to do was handcraft a personal website using raw HTML and CSS and JavaScript because I'm realizing that's the only way I'm going to actually get to the skills that will let me thrive in this new mobile-first all-JavaScript-all-the-time world.

Though, when it comes right down to it, I really like Markdown. And while I recognize the need to use a personal website project to tool up on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, raw HTML is almost as off-putting as Confluence's WYSIWYG editor to my writing process. So I figured what I really really really should do is go ahead and roll my own static site generator for templating Markdown into a beautiful, responsive personal website. Just think how much I'd learn doing that, and then I could get it do just precisely what it ought, and...

Stop. Just, stop.

So, here we go. Hello world. Blog rebooted.

Why Ghost? It's got just what I need to immediately be writing and publishing with zero hassle, Draft integrates well with it, and yet it has a tremendous runway for learning, what with being genuinely open source software (written in JavaScript no less).

Yak photo CC-BY : https://flic.kr/p/8rkjTZ