New Domain & New Software

Welcome to the new domain for the blog formerly known as erraticbits.ca.

I have a confession. Like many geeks, I've struggled with Sudden Domain Acquisition Disorder (SDAD) for years. Every few months, I'll hit my registrar of choice (these days, it's Porkbun) and impulsively buy far too many domains. Every time I have a new project idea, my first step is to run out and buy three or four "perfect" domains. I won't admit to how many domains I own right now—it's embarrassing.

Well, as a natural consequence of my struggle with SDAD and some feedback that my former domain erraticbits.ca could easily, at a glance, look like something hosting very different content; I've moved my blog over to a new, sexier and shorter domain qoda.ca.

Why "qoda"?

<godfather accent>
Jeff is just another 'qoda with a passion for building software and learning new technology.
</godfather accent>

Groan... But seriously, it's a nice short domain that vaguely sounds like "coder" and semi-cool four-letter domains are hard to come by these days!

In addition to the new domain, it also seemed like a good time to switch the backend away from Hugo (which is awesome software) to Ghost (which is also awesome software).

In general, I think static websites are awesome:

1. They are easy to host
2. They are cheap to host
3. Fewer moving parts mean they rarely break
4. Fewer moving parts mean they rarely get pwned by some idiot on the Internet

But...

There was just too much friction to add content and, if I'm being honest, it came down to a couple of things:

1. I bounce between machines a lot, and managing in-progress articles was annoying—not hard, just slightly irritating. I'd forget to check my in-progress article into git. When I had a few minutes to update that article later, I'd be on a different machine with no convenient way of resuming my inflight article.
2. Images. I love Markdown but dislike dealing with images in Markdown content. The workflow is disjointed enough (take screenshots, save to disk, move to blog post folder, add image tag, etc.) that it's annoying.

The result was that I was spending more time futzing with my build chain than writing content for the blog (which I think is perfectly natural for us developer-y types).

I thought about rolling out WordPress again but couldn't get past that icky feeling. WordPress is too big and all-encompassing. It has too many options, themes, plugins, and far too much PHP for my liking.

So... Here I am with the next iteration of my blog in Ghost—just in time, as luck would have it, for Halloween!

This time, for sure!

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