I am, at best, an intermittent publisher. In the last iteration of the site, the last blog post I had written accumulated cobwebs for close to 11 months. So I am not the most fastidious author in the world. Sue me.

This blog has languished during that time, and I wondered what would it take for me to become interested in writing a full-on post again. I just did not want to write. And it occurred to me that I don’t particularly enjoy the act of writing. I made a small list of the self-imposed obstacles that keep me from wanting to write:

1. Obtuse Publishing Systems

   This site was previously running on ExpressionEngine. I have nothing against ExpressionEngine. It is my preferred out-of-the-box CMS tool, but that’s not really what I wanted for this site. WordPress is such a huge beast, using it for a tiny blog is downright unwieldy. Tumblr and Posterous have stepped up as great lightweight web publishing tools, but I wanted to build something that was entirely mine: my own templates, my own workflow. I kind of miss the early days of web publishing — hacking out raw html in a text editor, publishing manually.

   I am not afraid of HTML and if I wanted the control I desired, none of those other tools would work. Then I read Blogging Like a Hacker by Tom Preston-Werner, one of the founders of (beloved) GitHub. Jekyll is now powering this site, and I am really pleased with its simplicity and flexibility. It scratches all my aspirational hacky itches. A series of custom Rake tasks keep my workflow humming along nicely.

2. Bad Writing

   For every workaday hacker or designer there are twelve bloggers ready to trivialize their ambitions. CSS developers and designers have a multitude of “CSS Galleries”. Other developers have the trolls on Hacker News and Proggit. And somewhere in between is a battery of Top 100 lists and social media marketers. It is a scary, intimidating, noise-filled world for those who dare to dabble in development, design, or authorship. All across the web is a cesspool of hacks all telling you how right they are.

   It is easy to believe that in order to succeed, you have to contribute to the noise. Web publishing has evolved to the point where it’s no longer about how you speak your voice, it is a matter of how loud you can project.

   There is a fantastic little post by Chris Wanstrath (also of GitHub; they are awesome) that really helped pull me out of the notion that in order to be a good programmer, you have to be a loud, talkative programmer. Do not be intimidated by the army of “social media experts” telling you how to do it.

3. Good Writing

   Where the default is noise, the signals stand out that much clearer. With writers as good as Zeldman, Gruber, and Mann it was really all to easy for me to say “why bother?” They are so good at what they write about, and so distinct. I felt that in order to say anything, I would have to say it at least half as good as these guys could. That’s hard!

   There are a large number of people I respect who write online. They are witty, concise, and sharp. If I could write that way…

   Well I can’t and/or don’t. So what? I try my best to focus on my projects and when it comes time to have to write about those things, I will do it in my voice the best way I know how. Just admitting that is a huge step in becoming a better writer.

4. Good Design

   When I first broke into web development, it was because I wanted to be a “web designer”. I don’t think that title is real nowadays. My official title at Scripps Networks is “Front End Developer”. For a while I felt that in order to prove my skills with HTML and CSS I had to have a mind-blowing, gallery-worthy design.

   Jason Santa Maria is changing the way designers think. Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction is the textbook on design for the web. Tim Van Damme is the designer everybody wishes they were. Dan Cederholm is a pixel magician. Shaun Inman is both prolific and meticulously detailed. I need to face facts; I will never be as good of a designer as these guys.

   And that’s okay! I’ve been inspired by the aesthetics of Alex Payne. I can dress this up however I like. It’s mine. It can change, my tastes can change. That is okay! What is important isn’t the design, but that I don’t hold off on publishing important information about my open source projects because I am not happy with the typographic grid. That is just dumb.

So I have reworked MarkWunsch.com to be something for me; by me. It is published through a series of Rake tasks written in Ruby, so that I can exercise my programming muscle. It uses some of the new features of HTML5, so that I can tinker with the new tool of my craft. This site is built to minimize the mental barriers that have kept me from writing about what I am working on.

I do not promise a regular publishing schedule, instead I want to focus on making things worth writing about. In migrating to the new system, most of the previous articles have been taken offline. I thought they were just poorly written noise, and I am trying to avoid that.