I thought about using “Radial Land Gnarl All Nerd” as the title of this blog, since anagramming is all the rage these days, but confusion is never fun. Well, almost never.

Well, sometimes.

Anyway, I’m back. I don’t recall if I ever actually blogged on randallsquared.com; I think it was always more of a businessy site than my personal site. The business “RandallSquared” has been defunct since at least 2008, so it’s probably safe to switch it up, now.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to move a lot of stuff here that would otherwise be comments on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, or wherever.

Starting a blog on randallsquared.com is something I’ve been “meaning to do” for many years, but there have been reasons why it seemed like a good idea to put it off. I didn’t like most of the blogging engines available (like WordPress, etc). I didn’t want to point randallsquared.com at something like Blogger or Blogspot. Generator tools seemed clunky and I didn’t want to bother with the languages they tended to be written in (Perl and Ruby were the major ones). Writing my own blogging engine was attractive, but I didn’t have time to do even the minimal feature set I would have preferred.

Later, creating a site became more and more of a potential chore, because the server randallsquared.com was on was old and busted (I was using CPanel on CentOS 5.x to manage several domains for myself and friends), and it became more and more difficult to install newer software on it, culminating in a situation where CPanel couldn’t update itself (for the third or fourth time in the last five years) without manual help.

I had a number of miscellaneous issues installing node.js and npm on the old server, and basically the only thing that was easy to keep up to date on it was PHP. PHP is not the worst thing in the world (well, some differ), and is probably the language I have the most experience with, but I would have preferred something like Go. Due to the CPanel issues, I decided to start moving things over to a new server rather than continue messing with the old and busted one, and to push me into it, I went ahead and started up a new server before I left on a trip, to create an artificial sense of urgency about the switch when I got back. That worked okay, and I moved over the randallsquared.com domain, and went looking for a blogging engine. Et voila! There was a nice generator tool written in Go, and it seemed well thought out. So, that’s what I’m using.

If you start watching now (Nov 4, 2014), you’ll probably see some churn, as I move things around and learn more about hugo, the blogging engine I’m using. When I add things I wrote before the blog start time, I might backdate them, but if that seems confusing, I’ll probably just mention the approximate date of creation in the post. There’s that confusion issue, again.