For years now I’ve tossed around the idea of setting up a personal site and blog. Usually, I would get a burst of inspiration after running into a problem, generally Linux-based, that I eventually figured out after banging my head against the wall. But before I could get around to doing anything with that solution, I would invariably become distracted by Yet Another Shiny Object™ and that was that.

So, I’ve finally gotten around to it. “Why now?” you may ask, after The Internet™ has moved on to Facebook, or Twitter, or Medium, or whatever? Well, I’m usually late to the party, regardless of the occasion. Actually, I’m usually really late to the party. But the nice thing about showing up to a party long after everyone else has gone home is that you get to pick the music - although you usually have to order your own pizza, which is a bummer.

In all seriousness, it was a confluence of things. For one, the thought has been on my mind a lot more recently than usual. Additionally, I’ve been tinkering with several things that I thought would be helpful to post somewhere on the internet, if for no other reason than so that I can find them later when I need them and can’t remember any of the details - and I happened to actually make notes this time.

What finally pushed me over the edge was Google Code closing down, interestingly enough. Years ago I wrote a few screen savers and released on Google Code, complete with a Google Pages site for them. Well, since Google Code is joining the great GeoCities in the sky, I decided to A) move the repository to GitHub to join various other projects that I’ve started, and B) find a new home for project page as well as the poor excuse for a home page I put up when I started The Idle Screen Project.

In looking around for a place to move the project page I ran across Jekyll, which piqued my interest. The fact that it is simple, uses an open source, markdown-based engine that plays well with Git and is easy to set up and demo at home - well, what’s not to like? Particularly for a person who still keeps various notes and brainstorming lists in LaTeX. (Yes, I’m one of those people.)

So, anyway, we’ll see where this goes. Stay tuned for what I hope are interesting and/or useful posts on various open source- and tech-related topics that keep distracting me from actually moving that fool screen saver page and properly setting up the repository.