The making of this blog

Getting this blog online has been a bit of a headache. For all these reasons, I was convinced to start blogging. After reading various disccusions surrounding Google+, I was also convinced to put it up on my own domain. I also figured it was high time I had experience running a website. Turns out I did actually learn a lot. ~

I went out and registered “dlederle.com” after Coffee and Domains turned up in a “Show HN” post on Hacker News. I had been mulling over this stuff for a couple days when they posted it and bought on impulse. It was indeed very easy to register and I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was now master of my own domain.

Then I spent some extremely frustrating time learning the basics of DNS records through trial and error. I now realize I was not Coffe and Domains “target audience”. Their stripped down, clean interface is actually pretty awesome now that I know what an A record is. But figuring it all out sucked a lot. Eventually I managed to get it pointing to heroku.

I had completed the Play! Yabe tutorial and thought to myself “Well, that can totally power my little blog!” At this point I was also debating whether to go Java or Ruby for the backend of the site. I realize this is overkill for the simplicity of an essentially static site, but part of the goal of this blog is to be a little playground to try out tricks and snippets of code I find. I like a lot about Ruby, including its syntax and especcially the ease of heroku. Then I found out that my mian programming class in the fall would be in Java, and heroku added Play! support. Decision made.

A week of infrequent tinkering yielded nothing buy a place holder home page. No disqus comments, no rss, no beautiful layout. Having blown two blog deadlines for my senior seminar, I broke down and did a 10 second toto install, which I should have done in the first place. Right now, I’m running blog.dlederle.com as a toto app on heroku and dlederle.com as a Play! app also on heroku. I bet this violates some design principle, but until I learn why I’m gonna stay in my happy Java/Ruby hybrid world.