Another well intentioned January starting point...

Ahh January...

It's that wonderful time of year that's just pregnant with promise. The time of new beginnings, new undertakings. Change for the better. It's no wonder that new gym membership subscriptions soar at this time of year.

The sad truth is of course, that all our good intentions and indeed our enthusiasm for them, generally peters out by about mid-February.

Not this time though! Let us live in this delusion a little while longer, as I explain that in 2016 I've decided to create my own little space on the web, in the guise of the delightful blog you currently find yourself reading.

(Really, how did you get here exactly?!)

All change please.

For years I've had a blog over at Simian Enterprises that housed my various code shenanigans, and occasional rants.

As with many blogs, the frequency of updates became less and less, as I became busier and busier. It was always my intention to post little updates detailing what I'd been working on with samples of any code I thought worth sharing... but who has the time?

Over the last couple of months, I've been dabbling a bit in HTML5 game development. I've been documenting my progress offline, with the intention of posting online at some point. Given that this has little to do with my application development work, it seemed that the Simian Enterprises blog wasn't the right place for this - and so I decided I would retire the old blog and transfer the content over to my own personal site at garystanton.co.uk.

Posting on a specifically personal site rather than on my company website, should allow me to write more diverse content.

I code, lots. But I do other things too, and I also have strong opinions no-one really wants to hear. What better place for them than this little corner of the interwebz? Plus I can swear here too.

Fiddlesticks!

See?

Stand clear of the platform.

I've had ideas about this blog floating around in my head for a couple of years now. As with a lot of developers, I spend so much time and effort working on projects for clients that I very rarely find the time to work on my own site, and so nothing ever really happened.

I realised that I was never going to sit down and spend the time to hand craft the perfect website and so decided to just get it done - and to that end I'm using a cloud hosted blogging solution, Ghost.

This feels odd to me. I like to build things from scratch. It's what I do. I like to build them in CFML primarily. I like to have full control over the minutiae of every byte... I'm actually writing some basic blogging software for a client at the moment!

Handing over the reigns to another system feels... weird.

I also realised that I probably wasn't going to find the time to push pixels around in Photoshop and come up with a lovely, expressive design that wowed viewers whilst alluding to the nuances of my character... etc.

So for now I've simply downloaded a theme that appealed to me - no longer appeals to me - Do you like the new theme? ;)

I'm not sure how I feel about Ghost yet. Again, I wasted lots of time wading through the various blogging platform options and there's too many to really know if I've made the right choice. I'm fully prepared for the possibility that I will migrate to another platform, or eventually roll my own - and you, dear reader, should be prepared for this eventuality also. If you're reading this in 2016, the blog may well look completely different the next time you visit.

I'm also not sure whether Ghost can handle importing my old posts from the Wordpress powered Simian Enterprises blog. I don't feel a blog is right for that site any longer, but I'd still like the content to be available here.

We shall see what happens.