I have decided fairly recently to move my blog off of tumblr. First off let me say that I love tumblr and think it is a great platform and service.  There have been times where I have found the service to be a bit limiting though.  

At ninthdivision we recently switched from subversion to mercurial. We have had a few ideas around writing extensions for mercurial to better fit in with our overall workflow.  Neither Andy nor myself know much about the python language so I started writing a few utilities in python and felt that I needed a project to really learn the language.  I started looking for python web frameworks and settled on django.

I find django is be perfect for what I'm using it for so far.  On a personal level I rather like python and would like write more software in it.  So writing blog software seemed like a good start. I figured it would give me some experience in python,django and overall deployment of a website.

This site runs on Ubuntu with nginx/apache, python/django and postgresql.  So far this has been a pleasant experience and strangely therapeutic.  I have always enjoyed writing software, but that pales in comparison when it is your own software.  I am reminded of a time in my career when everything was new and I was just in awe of all of the awesome things one could do with code.

With all of that said, I know this isn't for everyone whether you write code or not.  I would hop every few years from one blog to another always looking for some feature that the last one didn't have.  I have to add whatever feature I need in the timeframe that I want it.  It is strangely liberating and yet daunting at the same time.  Since I am now fully responsible, it is up to me to worry about backups, databases, load etc.. And since I am new at this it is inevitable that mistakes will be made.

I sincerely hope that this process will enable me to write more content and for me to learn how to communicate more effectively.  So far it has been a blast and I plan to keep adding stuff as needed.  It is nice having a corner on the web that only belongs to you.