My apologies for the big mess here. As some of you who follow me on twitter might be away, I accidentally blew away all the source for this blog while trying to fix a syntax highlighting problem with some older posts. I thought I had a back-up of the source on my external drive but it turns out that I was not telling it to back up my home directory, for whatever reason. How awkward.

Luckily I sill had the dump of data from my old WordPress blog in a database so since I was still going to use Jekyll, I used one of the provided converters and got back to work. I was still missing 13 posts though. Those were fairly easy to recover thanks to the awesomeness that is Pandoc. What is Pandoc? It bills itself as a "universal file converter" and it does a pretty good job. I used it to convert those old posts in HTML format into Markdown. Now that I had all my posts (stretching back to October of 2005) it was time to renovate.

I'm not using just Jekyll. I decided to use Octopress, which is a suite of tools written in Ruby that sit on top of Jekyll. I edit my posts in Markdown as usual, and then it's "rake generate && rake deploy" to make new posts. Of course, it wasn't quite that simple but that is the basic version of it.

(Edit: I previously had said I was going to drop comments from the blog but because I kept the same URL structure, the Disqus plugin for Octopress was able to easily find them. Another small victory for Octopress)

Finally I apologize to people who are reading my feed if I have just blasted them with 800+ posts due to me setting the blog up again.

Anyway, I'm back and expect the info to start flowing again.