Years ago I ran a small personal blog called area256.com (redirected here now). It started in high school with a fully HTML based site written entirely from scratch. Later I moved over to using wordpress, which I stayed on for a long time. However, overtime I found the wordpress platform, as rich and powerful as it was, to be slow and difficult to maintain. While I'm perfectly happy to dive into the source code to make something work the way I'd like, instead of creating content for the blog, half the time I was just updating the backend to do what I wanted.

So when I got a new domain (renard.io), I figured it was time to try something new. Having done a lot of work with node.js in one of my jobs, I became interested in the node.js based Ghost platform. It was very beta or even alpha feeling when I first installed it, so for a while I just held off, but now that it has reached 1.5+, and fixed a lot of the maintenance issues, I figured it was worth giving a serious try. We will see over the next few months of using it how well this switch turns out. I will post updates on the experience doing more complex tasks as I play around with this new platform.

So now that I have a new blog what kind of topics will it cover? All kinds of subjects I find interesting or happen to be working on. I'm not creating a themed blog, or restricting myself to one or two areas. So there will be photography posts (with hopefully nice photos), topics related to my work (high performance computing and radio telescopes), little hacker projects with things like the Raspberry Pi, lots of Linux sysadmin related content, some math and research, a product review or two, and anything else I find interesting.

(The post photo was taken near the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in BC, Canada.)