The Making of andersnoras.com: Blogs are so 2005

I’ve tweeted more than 2000 times since I got into it back in March last year - during that same period, I only posted a handful of blogs. It’s obvious that the blue bird radically changed the way I express myself online. Checking in on reality, I needed to make a choice. Should I just leave the old andersnoras.com around for web archeologists to explore, or should I try to come up with something fresh? The pink, orange, black and grey pixels surrounding this text answers that question. This is the first post in a series on how the new andersnoras.com came to be, how it’s built and why I ditched a fully controlled self-hosted blog for a mashup of readily available services.

Blogs are sooo 2005

The new andersnoras.com is more or less a geek-site dressed up as a fashion blog. I’ve changed the content profile from being strictly programming, software engineering and stuff to also include random things I find amusing. Something in-between Twitter and a traditional blog. I’ll wanted to post different kinds of content, like links, photos, mini podcasts, blog entries and the works - and I wanted the friction free style of Twitter, Remember The Milk, Evernote and all the other web apps I’ve grown to love.

For inspiration, I went outside the tech-blogosphere looking at brilliant blogs like SimpleBits, Jason Santamaria, Matthew Buchanan and Typenuts.

Oh, spikey!

I made a terrible choice of platform when I launched andersnoras.com 1.5 back in 2007. Before that I had a blog on Dot Net Junkies. I decided to stick with Telligent’s CommunityServer, which is what the junkies are running, for the second coming of my blog. I figured that since I now was hosting everything myself, running on .NET would be a great idea since I easily could build new features with familiar tools. Right. Like that ever happened. Instead, I found myself the proud owner of a rather enterprisey blogging platform, with forums, galleries, multiple blogs and lots of things I really didn’t need. I found all sorts of excuses for not blogging; “If I’d only gone with WordPress” or “No way I’m firing up Parallels to run Windows Live! Writer”.

So, why not WordPress? When I decided to do something about my sad site, I set up WordPress, rolled up my sleeves, dusted off my PHP skillz and set off to customize it to be the platform I wanted it to be. WordPress is a great because it’s a brilliant blog engine, twisting it around to become something different led me onto a the heavy friction road towards an complex beast - that’s what I was running from. Scrap that.

What I really wanted was Tumblr, so after a quick detour into Gelato, I decided to stop thinking like a developer and mash it up!

To be continued…