Welcome.

I’m speaking to you now from my new website, which I’ve uncreatively titled Liss is More.

This project was done for a few reasons.

Learn. I needed an excuse to learn Node.js, which is something I’ve heard quite a lot about lately. From what I’ve gathered, it’s a great way to stand up an easy HTTP server. In my experience, it’s been exactly that. At the time of this writing, I wrote just under 400 lines of code to create the blogging engine that served you this page.

Granted, it isn’t very advanced, but that’s damned impressive.

I decided to host at Heroku, because I had heard good things about it, I thought I could get hosting for free (since the site is so small), and I wanted to try it. I had also considered Azure, but their pricing information is so convoluted, I gave up on figuring it out.

While I don’t really have a name for the engine, I am considering open-sourcing it. There’s a lot of violations of DRY that I need to clean up first, as well as some other general tidying. Smart money says I’ll never get around to it, but we’ll see.

Control. As a friend of mine has said, controlling your own environment is important. While I’ve been a Tumblr user since January of 2008, I wanted to try something new, and perhaps more serious. Furthermore, I wanted to control things. I wanted to write the code myself, and I wanted to control how it is executed and deployed.

Personally, I don’t want to control the machine it’s running on. I don’t want to worry about patches, updates, connection issues, or anything else like that. I just want to write the code I care about, push it to some server somewhere, and watch my changes appear like magic.

What I did want is to control everything about my code and my content. Now I do.

Trends. Come on! Everybody’s doing it! Certainly, both cohosts of my podcast wrote their own blogging engines in their languages of choice. I wanted to do the same, but I wanted to write my blogging engine using a framework/technology that was, itself, trendy. Hence, I used Node, as well as some other technologies.

Inspiration. Finally, I created Liss is More in order to inspire me to write more, and do so long-form. I’m a prolific Twitter user, but I feel like there is room between writing 140 characters ephemerally and talking for an hour or two weekly. By having a site that I’m proud of, and that I made myself, I hope to quietly convince myself to write more. Time will tell if I accomplished that goal…