So this is always the intimidating part of a development blog… the first post. There are few things more pity-worthy than a blog with “Hello World” followed by “First post!”, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

I haven’t kept a development blog since 2002, and although I was reasonably busy with blogging, it obviously never made me famous. I used to use my own CMS for blogging, and because I work largely with content management I began to feel if a blog wasn’t using my own software I was somehow a fraud. I’ve written my fair share of blogging features for company platforms, but like the anecdotal builder who just never gets around to their own home improvements because they’re busy working on other peoples homes, so went my blogging.

I’d long gotten into the habit of keeping development notes in markdown in the form of git repo readme files and used in conjunction with a hacked together document generator that transforms .NET XML API docs into Markdown, it makes for not utterly embarrassing technical documentation. This isn’t very accessible for anybody other than devs working with the repo quite obviously.

So I decided that with GitHub pages there really is no reason not to have a blog for ongoing development notes especially when one take a look at the wide range of quality markdown based static site generators which work really well with git deployments. I wanted a Node based platform as a lot of the Ruby ones use Bunlder and I’ve had problems with bundler on this Windows workstation. So after a lot of browsing of different generators, I settled on Hexo. It’s easy to hack, has reasonable themes as a starting point and seems to be well supported. It may not be my final resting place, I might even finally get around to a static site generator for Conclave, but markdown is easy to migrate so there’s no reason not to get started with this now.