scientifics

The other day I decided to re-evaluate my writing and site since it has now been about 6 months since I began. While Wordpress works well for many people since it’s easy, I realized that I wanted something more simple that would encourage me to write more longform posts (more on that later).

The Software

After evaluating other options, I decided to go with Second Crack (writtten by Marco Arment). Second Crack is a static blogging engine, meaning the HTML is generated once when I write a new post. Wordpress generates the site for every hit.

Another great feature of Second Crack (and all other static engines) is that my posts are written and stored in Markdown. This makes for a nice archive that is portable to pretty much any blogging engine and can be converted to many formats (HTML, PDF, etc.).

The reason I picked Second Crack over the other options (Jekyll, Hyde, Octopress, Pelican) is it’s built in Dropbox support. When I am drafting a new post, all I have to do is save it to a certain folder in my Dropbox and my server generates a preview. Once I am satisfied with how the post is rendered, I just add a line to the file and it is published to the website. This makes it easy to write from anywhere.

The Blog

Evaluating my writing, I realized that I had moved too much over to the mindless link-post arena. While there is value in good link-posts (such as the ones from Shawn Blanc), those without good commentary just add to the noise on the Internet.

You will notice that I have not transferred any of my old link-posts to v3.

I will renew my focus on writing longform posts and if I post links, I will make sure I have something meaningful to add.

Another change that I have made is removing comments. Most of my favorite bloggers don’t have comments and instead engage in dialogue about their posts on Twitter (you can find me @scientifics).

Also, if you follow me in your RSS reader, note the new feed URL.