A while back, Dreamhost had some problems and my blog and assorted other websites I help keep track of went down.
For more than two weeks.
Now, I understand that crap happens. And I understand that sometimes lots of things happen at once. But fundamentally, their infrastructure is such that they could lose everything on a machine and be unable to get it back for more than two weeks. I’m not a mathematician, but that’s not “five-nine” service.
So, I decided to start hunting around for another provider. And then I got distracted by the idea that maybe having my blog in WordPress was more trouble than it was worth. There’s something to be said for simplicity, especially since all I really wanted to do is throw up posts written in markdown with code samples.
I got a few pointers toward using middleman, a pre-processor that takes in almost anything and produces regular css/html. Between that and Disqus for the comments, well, this just seems easier. And now that I’ve put in the effort, it’ll be easier to actually get blog posts up, most importantly, move it over when I find a new hosting provider.
Feel free to tell me how ugly it is and suggest improvements. I have the design skills of a one-eyed poodle.