I have been playing with the idea of starting a blog for a while now, however I always ended up putting it off because there were other more “important” things to do. Now that I have a little bit time on my hand I decided to stop procrastinating and start blogging.

My goal with this blog is to share my knowledge regarding web-technologies and applications in the scientific field (my current field of expertise). I will blog about the various projects I work on, the technologies that underlay them and the challenges I encounter and if possible provide solutions.

I enjoy reading blogs about various interesting topics in the field of web-technologies and the modern web. It is inspirational to see how people approach problems and try to develop solutions. This is an invaluable source of knowledge and has often saved me a lot of time when dealing with similar problems. I hope I can also give some of my knowledge back to the community.

However I didn’t start this blog only out of altruistic motives but also as a way to keep track of the work I have been doing. Of course a blog is much more than just documentation of some code I wrote, so I will try hard to keep the blog posts condensed, structured and interesting for the readers. I guess this is easier said than done.

Hi @ Octopress

After I had decided to start a blog I still had to choose a blogging software. The main requirement for the blogging software was NOT to get into the way and allow me to concentrate on the content rather than administration and setup. First I thought about using a “traditional” blogging software like Wordpress or Blogger but I had the feeling that most of the features I wouldn’t use anyways.

I was looking for a simpler solution and eventually I stumbled over Static Site Generators. The most popular ones seem to be Jekyll, Octopress and Middleman. I am not really experienced in Ruby but they all seem to be quite straightforward to use.

A big advantage of using a static site generator is that I can use Github Pages for hosting my blog (Github has built-in support for Jekyll) and as most of my projects are hosted on Github anyways, this seems to be a natural fit.

I decided to go with Octopress which uses Jekyll under the hood but I didn’t really like their default theme. I was looking for a minimalistic white-space theme. I discovered Vladi Gleba`s beautiful Readify theme and I was quickly sold and decided to go with it. It’s a great minimalistic responsive Octopress theme that focuses on readability.