Bit Nebula

I first started blogging around four years ago, some time in the middle of 2010. My first blog was called 'A Thought or Three', which I then thought was a pretty cool name. However, SEO caused me to move to My Wireless Mind. I blogged there for a couple of years, until the December of '12.

I don't know why I stopped writing then, because I've always liked writing. Probably because I was too lazy, or there were too many other things to do. But I've always wanted to come back to the blogosphere.

Fast forward about a year and a half, and we come to the Summer of '14. Freshman year of college was over, and I thought the 3 month summer vacation would be a good time to start blogging again. I'd already decided that it wouldn't be on My Wireless Mind. Too much has changed since my last post there, and I felt newer posts would be too incongruous. Where to blog next?, was the question.

I spent an eventful fortnight or so experimenting with several blogging platforms, including but not limited to Wordpress.com, Blogger (with a custom template) and a pretty cool blogging site called Svtble. Always wanting things to work my way, I wasn't satisfied with any of these options. So, I decided to do what most enthusiast developers do when they're unsatisfied with software available to them, they build their own.

Enter Petroglyph, a static blog generator written in Python. I got the idea of static blog generators from Jekyll, a ruby based, 'blog-aware, static site generator'. Petroglyph works fine (as you can see from this blog), but it isn't ready for anybody else to use just yet. A lot of features are missing, and there are better ways to do some of the things I'm doing. The awesome part is that I can change whatever I want to change, because unlike all the aforementioned blogging platforms, with my own software, I'm in control.

I've gotten pretty close to the aim I had in mind while writing Petroglyph. I wanted it to be lightweight and easy to understand (easy to say, since I would be writing it) while providing sharing options using Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and commenting using Disqus. It's all held up till now, but I'll only find out when people actually start reading this blog.

Bit Nebula. I rather like the name. Why did I pick it? I can't really explain, apart from saying that I've always been fascinated by the idea that almost everything, including my thoughts and posts here, can be represented as a sequence of bits. Hence, Bit Nebula.

I'll end as I always end 'first posts' on blogs I attempt to write - or pretty much any project I work on - by saying that this time, at least, I hope I stick to it.