Well, yes, again. Technically, it's the second time you could ask the question as this is the third (hence v3 down at the bottom, in the highly unlikely scenario it was a question you had) incarnation of my web publishing efforts.
The history lesson
The first time it was a joint effort with a friend: a blog called net scenarios. I wrote mostly Cisco, he wrote mostly Juniper. And then we stopped, the domain expired and that was that.
The second time, I wanted to try a wiki - it is a great collaboration tool and it was meant to be a common place for a few friends/colleagues working in networking to store their notes and also use it as a publishing platform for articles and case-studies.
It ended up with my own notes and my own articles and nothing else. While I loved having version control and a text based back-end, it didn't really work with only me using it.
By that time, I was using dokuwiki for networking related notes and OneNote for everything else. I've written in another post how SublimeText, Markdown and git changed all that.
Several years down the line, I've launched v3, after a lot of very slow r&d effort regarding the platform to host it on and, more importantly, answering the question: am I going to be consistent and keep at it or is it just a waste of time? The answer right now is yes and time will tell which part it is the answer to.
Hmm...
Thinking back now, the reason why neither of those websites worked was the 三日坊主 or three-day-monk syndrome: you have a great idea, you get obsessed with it, you pour a lot of effort into it over a few days/weeks and then you stop.
I can say that I've changed a little in that respect and gained more experience (professional, but not only) that allows me to have more options when looking for that next post to write. It's also that each time I had an interesting case or a great idea about an article I could write, I added it to a list or saved a reference somewhere.
Seeing the list grow gave me the motivation to bypass the silly fear of "what if I don't have enough topics to write about?" or "what if the stuff I write about is not interesting?". As Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror writes in his (tongue-in-cheek but very good) How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step article, you have to keep at it (consistency is key, who knew). You get better and better and eventually find your audience. Unless you're really really really bad at writing - so please save the Internet and tell me now if that's the case, OK?.
This third version then...
I'll leave the technical discussion of why pelican (and friends) for another post.
You might notice that the first four posts are dated 2011. Yep, they're some of the original material I wrote, given new polish and leading the charge.
If this story struck a chord, annoyed you, gave you reason to criticize or encourage me, please post in the comments below.
Now go and look around, shoo!