I've been wanting to get off my provider for a long time. They were one of the first webhosts that were ultra-cheap. And I could put up a WordPress blog with now problem. It was 2006 . . . what could go wrong? I mean, they didn't have sftp but only clear-text ftp, but they wouldn't have that forever, right?

Well . . . it's 2014. The WordPress site is usually very slow. They still do not have sftp ("it would take too much server power to support sftp"). And the email system only hold 250MB per account. Not address -- 10 addresses would share the 250MB. Crazy. Insane.

The WordPress was so bad that I didn't want to write in it again. . . which is bad for someone who like to write. And I finally have some techincal stull I want to write about again. Like code snippets, which I have never been able to get right in my WordPress blog.

And there are some neat things happening in the static generator world. I've looked (and have used) a few. But since I've been using Groovy lately I decided to eat my own dogfood. So this site is being generated by a Groovy-powered generator called Grain. I honestly grabbed a template that I liked and started writing. It has SASS/Compass support built in and uses Python for Pygments as well inside the page generation. Yeah, seems like a kitchen sink. But I can update the Sass files and I don't have to run a script or anything to process them -- it happens automagically. That's pretty cool.

I plan on writing a bit more about stuff I've discovered in Groovy, my dive back into the Java world, and how I (imperfectly) converted all my old blog content into this Grain blog.