As I mentioned the other day, I am moving on from Unico and becoming an independent consultant (a grandiose title I give myself… Really I’m a contractor). To coincide with this, I am also revamping the layout of my site, with additional information about the sort of work that I do, community engagement, and how to get in touch. The site should now render better on mobile devices as well.

Sitepoint.com has just launched a mini-site dedicated to the builidng of mobile applications in all their forms, named BuildMobile. Inexplicably, they have chosen to feature my little application NodeDroid as their first featured app, and even more explicably they have asked me to contribte some stories as well. The featured app is up now, and my article will be posted in a few days. There’s nothing like having a wider audience (not to mention a deadline) to inspire you to write, so hopefully I’ll be a bit more regular with my postings there than I have been here :)

I’ve been playing with jekyll to create my website over the past few days. Primarily, I’m doing it to play with Ruby, but its also nice to have a new website :) Jekyll produces a static site, but does this using templates and markup. Its remarkably easy to set up a site, and to give it the look and feel that you want. Any dynamic capability can be provided by external services (e.

Earlier this month, I posted a new website for my hobby company 8bitcloud.com. As part of this change, I have now decided to host my personal blog here as well. My Blog will henceforth redirect to http://8bitcloud.com/blog.html. All URLs will continue to retrieve the correct posts, but with the new layout. There shouldn’t be any disruption to service, but who knows. RSS feeds should automatically switch over as well. I apologise if it re-posts everything I’ve ever done…

This site is primarily intended to allow me to play around with new stuff. As part of this, I’m playing with Jekyll, which is a simple, ruby based web generator which creates static sites programatically. Some advantages: Simpler hosting requirements. All you need is a web server like Apache If you want dynamic capabiilties, they can be added in via javascript. Will be able to survive a slashdotting (not that that is ever likely to happen to me) Not hackable through attacks on the CMS product, because there isn’t one Uses Markdown, which makes writing the content much easier.