Welcome to the redesigned Kutomo.
I have not been blogging for a good while, partly because I have wanted to redesign and rethink the whole thing, and partly because I’m just a lazy writer. My old blog had been running on Tumblr since 2008. Tumblr as a platform has served me well, and I haven’t been bothered by occasional downtimes or functionality changes.
Tumblr has improved drastically from the days when I first built my blog on it. Today it has beautifully designed multi-platform blogging apps and thriving community. However, like with many things recently, I wanted to gain more control of my blog. I didn’t want to be tied anymore to a company / product that basically could be gone the next day. I got scared of the disappearance of products I used to rely on.1 I didn’t want to have all my content in someone else’s control. I wanted to have plain-text copies of everything I write, and preferably plain-text (or markdown) writing should be part of the blogging process.
Today Kutomo is self-hosted and running on fantastic Octopress blogging framework. Octopress is based on Jekyll, a static site generator, but bringing few additional niceties into the mix. One of those is responsive design. Try visiting Kutomo.com with your iOS or Android device and it should look equally nice on each of those, although personally I really dig how this site looks on retina iPad (dem pixels!).
I’m hoping everything works as before, and I haven’t broken anything in the migration process. If you experience any weirdnesses with the new site or the RSS feed, please let me know.
I’m thinking of writing a bit more about the migration from Tumblr to Octopress (oh the pain) in the future posts. Also deployment of Octopress could be a topic of an interest for some folks.
But for the time being, enjoy the new Kutomo!