After a long hiatus, I’ve decided to start the blog again. I have lots of design stuff I want to do around virtual worlds and I need a place to put it.

I ported the old blog from WordPress to Jekyll and had to learn Markdown along the way. Someday I’ll go off on my rant on why I hate Markdown and its cousin YAML but that is for another blog entry. They are what they are and lots of people are using them so, with grumbling, I must adapt.

The port from WordPress to Jekyll wasn’t all smooth. Jekyll supplies a conversion program that converts the WordPress database into Jekyll post entries but I found that I couldn’t get the right combination of Ruby libraries working to make that happen. The result was my own conversion routine written for C#. It’s only in C# because, at the moment, I have a full development environment for it running and, secondly, I could include the DLLs so there are no dependencies to random old versions of external libraries. If you are in a similar spot, checkout jekyll-importws-cs.

The base theme for the Jekyll version of the blog is jekyll-clean by Scott Emmons. A good starting point that I have since taken many liberties with. I like his philosophy of not including every cool library and feature in the world. This makes for easy modification and support.