new domain and octopress

so looking back at it, i’ve been blogging since 2004. unfortunately, as time went on, i have pretty much ignored this blog. so in an effort to start writing more, i’ve decided to make some changes.

first, i’ve switched the domain - if you notice, you’re now on helw.net. this domain is shorter, ties closer to my name, and, most importantly, gives me a good domain for an email address (ahmed@). more on the reasons for that in a future post insha’Allah.

secondly, i’ve switched blogging platforms… i’ve “baked” the site, which means that this page, for example, is a static page - no more php to generate pages. this means that things should be a little faster insha’Allah.

the tool i’ve chosen to use is octopress - it’s open source, easy to use, versatile, and, in summary, i like it :) posts are written as plain text (markdown). they are then converted into html and pushed to the server via rsync.

it’s fairly cool to be able to run ack and sed on a directory of files to find things, change urls, etc. i also store the blog’s sources in git, which is cool.

exporting wordpress was easy, thanks to exitwp. just to be clear, i love wordpress and think it’s a great product. i am only leaving it to try something new (hopefully something that will encourage me to blog more).

oh, i should mention that, as a result of this move, comments have been moved to disqus. for those migrating, don’t forget to ensure that comments: true appears in the header section, otherwise, you’ll be wondering why comments aren’t working (thanks midnightcheese).

that’s about it for now!