Posts tagged with "blogging"

A few years back, not long after I got my first smartphone (a HTC Magic), I started maintaining a photoblog that was based around photos I took on that phone. The blog itself was very important to me as it covered a pretty difficult time in my life -- many of the images on it contained and conveyed feelings and emotions that seem a world away now, but which I never want to totally forget.

It served as a visual diary, a note to future me.

And, hopefully, it provided some entertainment for those who viewed it.

Sadly the company who hosted it closed down and the whole thing was lost, except for a hasty (and only partially successful) backup to a Wordpress blog.

After the blog died I sort of lost interest in trying to maintain one and, to some degree, lost interest in active photography in general. Between the blog disappearing and another disappointing event relating to photography I sort of lost confidence in myself and my ability to dare to publish photos online.

This year, despite how shitty it's been for the world in general, has been a really good one for me. Lots of positive changes have happened and continue to happen and I noticed that I was starting to do the phone-based photoblog thing again, albeit only via twitter.

Finally, this week, I've cracked and decided to make it "official". My old "Seen by davep" blog is reborn, with new content and the same old purpose. You can find it here: seenbydavep.blogspot.com

The blog itself is still driven by twitter and the posts will still appear on twitter. In the background I have an IFTTT process running, watching for any tweet of mine with the #photoblog tag and creating a post on the blog from it.

As for how often and what the content will be... simple: it'll be when I see something that I need to capture.

Hello, world.

So I've decided that it's time I had a blog again. An actual blog. Not a set of posts on Google+ or a torrent of 140-character thoughts on twitter but an actual blog.

Part of the reason for this is that there's a couple of personal coding projects I want to have a go at over the next few months and writing about them as I work on them might be fun. Another reason is that I've being wanting to explore the business of hosting a blog on GitHub pages for quite some time and now's the perfect time to do it.

So how am I doing this? Well, for starters, I recently acquired an iMac. The reasons for how and why I chose to do this are varied and mostly uninteresting but what it does mean is that, for the first time in quite a long time, I have a Unix desktop machine again. This fact alone means it's nice and easy for me to play with the likes of Git (or, at the moment more GitHub for Mac than the command line git), ruby, Jekyll and SublimeText (along with a rather nifty package for quickly kicking off a blog post). So that's how I'm doing it. Writing it all locally and pushing it up to GitHub and hosting it with GitHub Pages.

As this goes on I imagine much will change. I've started out with a basic setup, created by simply using:

davep@Ariel:~/blogging$ jekyll new davep.github.com

From now on I'll be playing with styles and my own layouts to see what I can come up with and what I like (although, I most say, for the most part I'm actually liking the clean look it delivers out of the box).

One thing that's obviously missing right now is a facility for commenting. That's something I'll look into should I feel it's necessary -- from what I've seen elsewhere it's easy enough to make use of something like disqus. Update: This has now happened.

One other thing I might look at doing is putting this behind my own domain. For the moment it's only available via github.io and I guess it might look nicer if it was actually available via a URL that looks like the name I've attached to the blog. Update: This has now happened.

Anyway, that's it for now. Time to push this up and think some more about where it'll go from here.