Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Reboot

Updated:

Note : This page may contain outdated information and/or broken links; some of the formatting may be mangled due to the many different code-bases this site has been through in over 20 years; my opinions may have changed etc. etc.

Well, it was about time. This blog has been stagnating for a long time, partly due to the clunky PHP-based system that used to run it. Needless to say, although I used to do a lot with PHP, I’m now old enough to know better. I’ve therefore done a “rip & replace” update on this site, switching instead to the wonderful, Ruby-based Octopress - a static blogging system built on top of Jekyll.

Besides the warm and fuzzy feeling of booting PHP out and using a lovely Ruby codebase, this also brings other benefits such as a massively reduced amount of effort required to manage this site and create content. Plus, it’s one less bit of software I have to worry about patching and securing.

I’ve ported most of the old site’s content over, although comments haven’t made the transition. I’ve added Disqus comments as a replacement, and will also look at extracting the old comments from the database so no information will be lost. You’ll also have to excuse any graphical glitches; the article’s HTML should be displayed correctly, but I’ve already had to make a couple of manual tweaks here and there, and will fix up things as I go along. Anyway, onwards and upwards!

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