Big week, world?

Previously, I wrote Hello World!. The first time I wrote it to say hello, and subsequently I added more thoughts over the years, almost every year. Almost every one starts with a hello world post, and I will not deviate here either.

Writing at my old blog, well, the blog you are reading now but in its previous form, stopped just a little over a year ago. I was tired of the maintenance of the codebase, tired of the design, tired of keeping up with the work of writing. Twitter and Google+ kept me busy enough, and Google+ in paritcular allowed me to kinda-sorta blog when I wanted to, and it handled mobile links well. The importance of this blog decreased until it was ignored.

But here we are a year later. What has changed? Twitter will become algorithmic and Google+ has a tumultuous future ahead. In any case, writing anywhere, regardless if it is a long form post, a brief code snippet or error log, or even a link, I wanted to be able to own it and keep it forever. Platforms come and go.

Over the years, between theme changes, migrations between servers and my fledging web-developer ineptitude, the old blog was a mess. The content needed to stay around for you and history. Once something made, destroying it is the worst possible outcome. I felt it held me back though. I felt responsible continuously for what I wrote there, especially as some of it was not considered as well as I wished it were. But everything else, the code and the design, needed to go.

The chronicle blog was set up to hold onto the posts and other content I made. Every post is preserved in time – everything there is frozen. Right now, it still runs WordPress, but soon too, will change as it transitions to a static after-image of its former glory. There are some subtleties to this chronicle though. Many visitors find much of my legacy posts useful so keeping them around is important, that is to say, keeping search compatibility is very important to me. I devised a clever solution to prevent the breaking of URLs between this blog and the chronicle. Anytime there is a 404 here, this blog will politely ask the chronicle if a page exists or not, if it does, the page is redirect transparently as if the URL had never changed and never not-existed. Because of this clever trickery, I can be happy and perhaps someone searching on “How to Force Quit in Ubuntu” can be happy.

By having the chronicle, I can write whatever I want freely again with no legacy in the way and with a design that seems a bit more timeless (and potentially, pretty familiar).

So thanks for sticking around.