I am not a coder, but I like to pretend I’m one sometimes.

Back during med school and residency, I was writing this blog using Blosxom (from August 2003 until February 2006.) While writing entries in plaintext directly onto the file system has its advantages, I figured I was paying for hosting and might as well have a web-based editor.

Wordpress seemed to be a great idea at the time. Until I tried to some customization and tried to learn how to code in PHP. Just the syntax alone alienated me, and I found myself jumping onto the buzzword-laden Rails bandwagon.

Technically, as of now, my Rails-based blog is still online, but the last real entry is from February. (The entry from August was just a test post.) I’m hoping to decommission it after I’ve completely migrated all my old entries to Jekyll.

Before deciding on Jekyll, though, I did very briefly flirt with Ghost But running Node.js meant I had to setup a VPS on DreamHost and there was no real migration path from Mephisto to Ghost (whereas there is an imperfect way to migrate from Mephisto to Jekyll)

I know that PHP isn’t dead, not by a long shot (although it looks like they kind of choked on trying to implement Unicode properly and on standardizing method calls, so PHP 6 ended up never happening.) Meanwhile, I was only dimly aware that Rails as a platform and as a community was beginning to crash and burn back in 2007 (although I was quite aware of Rails’ scaling woes due to constant Twitter failwhales and because Twitter decided to eventually abandon Rails.)

But Rails merged with Merb, and now Rails is on version 4. But the only Rails-based blog engine that survived those early days seems to be Publify (née Typo). Instead, static site generators seem to be the buzz these days.

I’ve sort of come full-circle from the days I was building my blog with hacked-together Makefiles, XSL stylesheets, and completely ad-hoc XML specifications.

While Rails isn’t dead, Node.js does seem to be definitely eclipsing it. Maybe someday, it will come standard with basic hosting the way PHP and Rails does now, but until then, I guess I’m running with Jekyll.