For the most part it is all the same. The old site was powered by Scoop. Don’t take this the wrong way, Scoop is a fine engine to run a site, although it’s designed more for collaborative sites and included a ton of feature that I didn’t really need or use.

So over a year ago I decided to write my own engine to drive the site. “How hard could it be?” I thought. Well as I said I’ve been working on this for over a year.

Now I’m compelled to say that there are lots of fine and free engines for putting up a personal web site. They’re pre-packaged and pretty much ready to go. So why build my own?

I guess it comes down to the geek factor. While many packages did most of what I wanted, they all lacked in small but still significant significant ways. If I wanted to use an existing package, I’d have to modify it to suit me. Now a lot of blog packages are open source, so I could just modify them to do what I wanted.

That’s a problem for me though. Reading and understanding how some of those packages work was just as hard as trying to do it myself. I was looking for another personal project anyway, so I decided to do it myself from the ground up.

My first attempt was with PHP. I chose it becuase it’s fairly comon and has a reputation for being pretty easy. I set up a development environment on my laptop and went at it with some initial success. However I discovered that putting things together the way I envisioned wasn’t quite as simple.

After a year of struggling with that, I finally paid attention to some buzz I had been hearing about Ruby on Rails. I surfed over to their site, watched a couple of videos and was completely blown away.

I did a little more research and picked up a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails. That was the clincher. Ruby on Rails did a ton of stuff for me automatically. Leaving me free to concentrate on layout and functionality.

So after a year with PHP, I jumped ship and went with Ruby on Rails. Now, in just three months of working in my spare time, I have my new site up and running. True it looks a lot like the old one, as most of the changes are behind the scenes. But that was the point.

The design is simpler, and does exactly what I want it to do for the initial release. If you’ve been here before, you might notice some changes in the way articles are displayed. However my goal was really to make it easier to post messages while keeping the same overall feel for the public.

Hopefully my programming skills will hold up on the net, but there’s only so much testing you can do. Sooner or later, you have to put it out there and see what happens.

So internet, here’s my baby. Be kind, please.