Just as we race towards the end of the decade, I’ve finally updated the Logic Colony website and moved to a new web publishing platform.

The website needed an update to showcase current and future products. I think anyone who saw the old website will agree that the new version is a lot slicker. This was also a chance to simplify and streamline the way the blog and website is being served up. The previous version of the website was a custom Ruby on Rails application that supported, amongst other things:

• authoring posts within the browser
• tagging
• site wide search (by tags and free text)

It worked well, and on the whole I liked it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the solution was overkill and ultimately required more work on my part than it should do. Did I really need to be able to write and publish new content within the web browser? Was my search facility ever going to be as good as Google’s?

Sure it was a fun programming exercise to develop the previous version of the site, but ultimately it was a case of over-engineering. Even worse, running a web application has its own support costs. Updating the software stack used to run the website (critically to keep up with security patches), is just another chore that I could do with minimizing.

So the new site is just statically served up content. I’m using the excellent jekyll static site generator to do the heavy lifting. I just keep a git repository of the site on my Dropbox so I can edit and push it up onto the server from any of my machines. Yeah, this means I can’t jump onto some random machine in an internet cafe and update the site. But then, I never needed to do that anyway.

So now I have a simpler web publishing solution for the site and the blog. Less work to maintain it. More time to focus on what matters: making great software and writing articles for the blog.