Disregarding all the life reasons involved (eg. leaving Digg, leaving SF, traveling around for a few months, etc.), this blog, and subsequently everything else on the olivernassar.com and onassar.com domains are running my own codebase. No WordPress. No blogger. No typekit or tumblr.
So what that means is that from last November through now, I was writing my own blogging system. Nothing fancy, but it took a while because I wrapped it all up in a nice MVC framework I call fred.
It's got a bunch of bells and whistles (runtime crons, regex url pattern matching, a full query-selector engine akin to ActiveRecord..) which I'll outline in follow up posts, but for now, that's my reasoning.
I did a ton of rewrites, but now have a very solid MVC framework that was built from scratch. The server is running a standard LAMP (php, not python flavour), and the client side is running a MooTools-based client side library with a bunch of custom classes.
I created 4 mini-applications which each of my subdomains (life/music/web) has. The first one is the blogging system, but in the next couple months I'll try and roll out the notes, links and reader applications as well.
Since no one really reads this blog of mine, this is more for looking back down the line to see what I was thinking.
As soon as I'm done a few minor tweaks on the code-base for this, I'm going to be going back over it and documenting a bunch of stuff (most notably for me, the process to get Ubuntu 10.10 with my exact config up and running perfectly) up and running programmatically.
Why leave WordPress?
I wanted to own my own codebase. I was using their OS (open-source) code-base on my own server, but ultimately felt like I couldn't integrate with it too well, and so figured I may as well create a solid/simple blogging system designed for what I wanted. Leave theirs behind, learn a bunch about MVC, and be able to extend it more.
Anyway, that's enough for now. 11 and a half months later and I'm back online.