Greetings, programs! Welcome to the new Usergenic website.

This is probably my 10th attempt at putting this site together, having tried various different blogging engines and services in the past and giving up on them at some point a few weeks later.

I’d probably used Wordpress about 3 of those times and basically gave up when the comment system completely filled up with spam. I’d also written a couple blog engines from scratch in Rails and Sinatra for Ruby and generally just didn’t find time to continue to build on or maintain them so I trashed them as I watched them age.

So I’m trying something a little different this time, using Octopress and just hosting my site with Github Pages. I think this will work for me this time because I generally prefer working my text editor with local files when I’m on my laptop. Also, I won’t have to worry about keeping services up on some box or dealing with databases etc, just to publish my site.

I’m compelled to start blogging again mostly because I want to participate more in the software community at large, whereas for the past few years I’ve been more or less cloistered with the development teams I’ve been working directly with at my day-jobs.

I am going to take the approach with the blog this time that its okay to post half-baked and incomplete ideas in the interest of getting conversations going, rather than just posting complete essays, reference articles and how-tos. I find that I’ve passed on putting out ideas when I didn’t have the time to fully flesh them out or dress them up and that means a lot of thoughts have gone unshared; no longer!

I don’t even have to finish this post.